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  Fred Morrison and the Pluto PlatterMay 31, 2012 5:41 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Image
(source)
 
^ That's Walter Frederick "Fred" Morrison demonstrating his "Pluto Platter" flying disc in the mid-50's. Morrison had first had the idea for a flying disc toy in '37, at the age of 17, while throwing a popcorn can lid with his girlfriend, Lu, at a Thanksgiving Day picnic (source). Those lids dented easily, but they found that cake pans flew better, and were more durable; the two soon had a small business going selling "Flyin' Cake Pans" for 25 cents a pop.
 
Back from flying fighter planes in WWII, Morrison came up with the first dedicated flying disc design in '46 ("Whirlo-Way"), and by the early '50's, had his first disc, the "Flyin' Saucer," which he sold at fairs. In '55, he and Lu, now his wife, created another disc, the "Pluto Platter," which Morrison can be seen demonstrating in the photo above; the name was intended to cash in on the UFO craze.
 
From the looks of the old photos,
 
Image
(source)
 
Morrison was quite the inventive and enthusiastic marketer of the Platters. But just a few years later, in '57, he sold the marketing rights to the Wham-O toy company. Morrison would produce several others inventions for the company, but he didn't approve of the new name they came up with for the Pluto Platter later in '57: they'd seen college students in Connecticut (Yale appears to take the credit) playing catch with pie tins from the Frisbie Pie Company
 
Image
image by Doug Coldwell (source)
 
--the name "Frisbie" was popular among the students. Apparently wishing to cash in on that youthful vibe, Wham-O decided to rename the Pluto Platter to the copyright-avoiding respelling, "Frisbee"--and the rest, as they say, is history.
 
Morrison won the patent for the disc's design in '58, and continued to be an enthusiast for another fifty-some years, if this Wham-O publicity photo of him tossing a Frisbee in 2006 is a fair representative of his activities. He passed away in 2010, at the age of 90.
 
 
 
 
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  A*'s death ray ghosts of 10,000 sunsMay 30, 2012 5:13 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Scientists working with the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have made another startling discovery, described in Harvard's (the author of the key research paper, Meng Su, is a Harvard astronomer) press release as "Ghostly Gamma-ray Beams Blast from Milky Way's Center."
 
If you're saying to yourself hey, that's where the supermassive black hole Sgr A* is, you're absolutely right! And if you're saying to yourself say, didn't the Fermi 'scope already recently discover some huge lobes of gamma radiation above and below the galactic core, then you're doubly right! Those were the so-called "Fermi bubbles" that I discussed back in September--big radioactive balls 25,000 light years across, just above and below A*.
 
This new discovery is very likely related to the process that created the Fermi bubbles, because it's just about the same size! Here's a conceptual illustration of the "Gamma-ray beams" (or what they may once have been--see below) superimposed on the bubbles:
 
Image
image by David A. Aguilar (CfA) (source)
 
Now, it's important to note that sharp-looking jets like those in that illustration are *not* what they actually found; if you look at the diagrams in the afore-linked research paper, you'll see that what they detected are very faint, vaguely cylindrical "cocoons" of gamma-ray-scattering space dust radiating outward about 27,000 light years from Sgr A*, tilted at about a 15 degree angle to the galactic pole. They *think* that these are most likely reflections--light echos, I suppose you could say--of relativistic jets of highly energetic plasma shot out of the poles of our galaxy's central supermassive black hole at some time in the past (at least 55,000 years ago, I guess, since at least some of the plasma would have had to travel 27,000 light years out, maybe at just under the speed of light, then its transmitted energy would have had to bounce back about another 27,000 light years to reach us), as we can see shooting out of distant galaxies whose supermassive black holes are actively sucking in (and jetting out) large amounts of material. Astronomers and astrophysicists have for some time now, based on other evidence of past star births and other things we can see around the core, supposed that A* goes "active" like that maybe every 100,000 years, but this is the first time that traces of the tell-tale jets have actually been spotted.
 
This may also indicate that A* is or was spinning at a different angle than the rest of the galaxy! It isn't clear yet whether the bubbles and the jets were formed in the same event; they could just as well be remnants from separate active periods. From the press release:

The two structures also formed differently. The jets were produced when plasma squirted out from the galactic center, following a corkscrew-like magnetic field that kept it tightly focused. The gamma-ray bubbles likely were created by a "wind" of hot matter blowing outward from the black hole's accretion disk. As a result, they are much broader than the narrow jets.
 
Both the jets and bubbles are powered by inverse Compton scattering. In that process, electrons moving near the speed of light collide with low-energy light, such as radio or infrared photons. The collision increases the energy of the photons into the gamma-ray part of the electromagnetic spectrum.

and

It would take a tremendous influx of matter for the galactic core to fire up again. Finkbeiner estimates that a molecular cloud weighing about 10,000 times as much as the Sun would be required.
 
"Shoving 10,000 suns into the black hole at once would do the trick. Black holes are messy eaters, so some of that material would spew out and power the jets," he said.

Go A*!
 
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I have the author of the webcomic Variables to thank for pointing out that he and some other webcomic authors have started up a Longform Webcomics subreddit on the popular link-sharing social networking site, reddit. I tossed an A* link in there to see if I could help this new subreddit get going. There are the popular "comics" and less-used "webcomics" subreddits on reddit already, but they tend to favor gag-a-day type comics, which I suppose are better suited to quick bursts of non-committal satisfaction. :) So it would be nice for "long form" webcomic authors such as myself ("long form" just meaning they tell a continuing story from strip to strip) if a thriving subreddit for sharing story comic links should flourish, but I guess we'll see!
 
 
 
 
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  Dragon docks, cosmodrome drama, inking videosMay 29, 2012 3:21 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Once the nose cone is removed, of course, it becomes a giant interstellar bottle of Coke. Also I may have gone a little overboard on spattering stars in there. ;)
 
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Space news shorts! The privately owned (although they're on a fat NASA contract, plus additional NASA subsidies) SpaceX unmanned "Dragon" cargo module docked with the International Space Station over the weekend, and the station's crew have begun unloading its cargo. There was only one problem with the docking, as far as we're told, and that was that one of the two "laser imaging systems" the module uses to see with was "picking up stray reflections from the station's Japanese module" that more or less blinded it—fortunately, the remaining laser imaging system was able to do the job on its own. Maybe don't spit-shine those modules quite so much next time!
 
And there's an interesting brouhaha brewing in Kazakhstan between the Kazakhs and Russia; Kazakhstan has put three Russian rocket launches (carrying seven satellites, from Russia, Belarus, Canada, and Germany) on hold, claiming that an agreement about the zone in north Kazakhstan—they're due to launch from the vast Baikonur Cosmodrome in south Kazakhstan—where the first booster stages from the rockets are planned to fall back to the ground has not yet been completed. Baikonur Cosmodrome was built in Kazakhstan by the Soviets, of course—Kazakhstan being part of the U.S.S.R. at that point—who currently use it under a least that is "due to last until 2050 and sees Moscow pay Astana almost $115 million in rent annually." BUT in January 2011 Russia began building a launching facility on its own soil—Vostochny Cosmodrome in the Russian Far East, due to be completed in 2018—and you couldn't blame the Kazakhs for suspecting that Russia plans to break its lease at Baikonur as soon as Vostochny comes online. So perhaps this current tiff is just a symptom of the looming rent issue.
 
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Somehow I found myself watching videos on comic inking on YouTube this afternoon. I've probably mentioned the ol' How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way comic-drawing guidebook that first came out in 1978 and formed the entirety of my youthful instruction—well, aside from reading hundreds of actual comic books :p—in the comic art form. Little did I know all this live-long while that co-authors Stan "Wearing Dark Glasses and Hyperbole Indoors" Lee and John "I. Am. Not. Reading. From. Cue. Cards" Buscema put together a video version around 1988 that more or less covers everything the book does, even recycling the drawings in the book (low-quality copies of them being placed not-so-convincingly under Buscema's roving pencil), all amusingly—in so many ways—narrated by Stan and John themselves. It came out on VHS and then DVD but I don't see a current release of it on Amazon—so here it is thanks to the magic of YouTube:
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLAD7F15CFF0B594FD&v=2H05IHhlS_o
 
(Unfortunately the final section wasn't included, so I had to splice it into that playlist from another uploader's series, which isn't embeddable :/; here's the full playlist of the unembeddable version if you'd rather just watch it all on YouTube.)
 
The Amazon seller trying to sell a "new" version of the DVD for $241 may be out of luck. :P This video version is pretty good at covering the basics of their now-somewhat-dated (I had to chuckle when Buscema intones something along the lines of "always draw your scene as if it is lit from a strong single light source") method!
 
Then I stumbled across this hour-long video of I think heretofore unfamiliar to me comic artist Tim Vigil penciling and inking a very detailed "sketch"; I like the rough yet graceful look of his brushed lines, which he seems to emit effortlessly in all sorts of shapes:
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSAbHlOOwZc
 
 
 
 
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  A* art show opens in two weeks!May 26, 2012 8:23 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Got an art show opening here in Seattle in just under two weeks; was working on planning a bit today, looks like there'll be about 26 pieces, 16 of them being framed A* original artwork--the 10 others are mostly framed A* prints, plus a few from The Princess and the Giant. Trying to fill up this big display space!
 
Oh and they made up these fancy cards for the show. I'm not sure why they left "free snacks" off them though, that's the important part! :d
 
Image
 
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EDIT: Here was the first version of today's page that went up:
 
Image
 
The secondary light source effect is nice but the mess in the shading on the side of her face (I waited too long in deciding to put a shadow there), a sort of slight but pervasive slant to her face (still there kinda I...think?), and a general wash-outiness bothered me into blasting them with black ink.
 
 
 
 
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  A*'s greatest gray hitsMay 25, 2012 7:56 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Thought I'd try putting grays to a bit better use in the art; I've been avoiding them a bit lately, since I wanted to make sure the impact of full black ink was coming across, and especially since a) I stopped giving myself the benefit of pencil layouts, so I've been relying on black strokes to form on-the-fly layouts, and b) I switched to a different, much darker ink about 23 pages ago, and found I would have to re-learn exactly how many swishes in water it takes to get such-and-such a gray tone out of it. In a hundred or two pages with the previous, sumi ink I'd pretty much gotten the hang of that, but in my ink testing I realized nearly every ink acts differently, especially in a wash, so I've been kind of scared to try anything more in the way of grays with this new one than simply adding a spot or two for decoration here and there after the full black ink.
 
But that, of course, misses out on really the whole point of using ink wash in the first place; I realized what I've been doing during much of the bar scene and then definitely during this fight scene has been kind of just traditional "get everything down in black" type of comic inking, which can do some things pretty well, but doesn't take advantage of the full range of ink wash for depth and atmosphere. In short, it was starting to look a little crude and lacking in subtlety to me. :P
 
Trying to work directly in with ink wash grays without any type of layout to follow is kind of scary, but I took the plunge today, and while it looked like a definite disaster at a few points, I think in the end it's a semi-decent start--kinda messy in some of those larger gray areas where it took me a while to get shapes and tones worked out, but there is at least some increased sense of light and depth that gets across, I think. It isn't any worse than any of the other artistic restarts I've tried of late, anyway. ;)
 
I thought I'd put together a little collection of where I feel I've had the most success with ink wash grays in the past; I've been studying these over the past day or so to try to see if I could figure out what exactly it was that worked in them, and how I could put it to use now, and that's actually been semi-useful. So clumping them together here will be helpful for my review purposes, and cathartic as I rattle on about each one. ;) Ready? Here we go!
 
Episode 13, Page 156
 
Image
 
^ This one felt like a breakthrough at the time--just about 20 pages after the switch from digital art--and I was never really quite able to replicate the feel of it. Like a few of these pages, it resulted from a long struggle: I'd started with black outlines of the facial features, but by the end I'd covered most of them with white ink, and reshaped the whole right side (her left) of the head, whose shape had been even more off than it is in this final version. :P
 
After I switched from digital to ink wash I'd very quickly worked up a little array of five pre-mixed tones of ink wash, from light to dark gray, that I kept in separate little bottles (old curry powder spice jars :P), and when I wanted to lay down some gray I'd say to myself "okay that's light but not to light, so we'll use bottle 2" or whatever. Pretty simple! ("Space Girl" comic book artist and ink wash virtuoso Travis Charest does something similar, I discovered later, but with just three gray washes.)
 
But I knew that I wanted to do a freestyle wash from her eye downward, around the cheek, as if eyeshadow was running in the shower. I hadn't really tried such a thing before, but I just kind of did it and it worked way better than I'd hoped! That pretty nearly completed the picture right there, but I went in with my measured washes to round out the face, get a little abstract (originally I was thinking like squarish light patterns from shining through a textured glass shower door or something) with the grays in the background, and fix the outline of the hair, although a lot of that would get buried under white ink eventually.
 
So that was pretty encouraging, and another, larger episode of sort of controlled freestyle washes on the next page went pretty well too--well enough that I then chucked the little wash bottles (they were annoying to have to keep around, anyway) and went all freestyle washes from there on out. This did lead to some disastrously muddled pages at the end of that episode (*shudder*), but by not too far into the next episode I kind of had a handle on it.
 
Episode 14, Page 6
 
Image
 
For instance, this page was almost all big washes, and went over pretty well, although it took me ages to get the shadow sufficiently dark under her eyes; one tricky thing about ink wash is that once the paper has been saturated by one wash, from then on out (maybe not once it's dried *completely*, but I'm not that patient) it is a little resistant to taking on subsequent washes, so what looks like a dark wash will only affect it lightly. So I went through a lot of washes, which was frustrating--oh and I had to rebuild the nose at one point, which had gotten a bit sideways--but in the end it resulted in this really thick-feeling, moody shadow on the face, which creates some quite effective atmosphere, particularly in conjunction with the bright light above and hanging shadows down the sides. It did kind of scare me off of trying another wash this thick...or maybe I just got a little better at remembering to go in with a darker wash on the second go-around. I should probably try some many-layered washes here and there, I suppose, although whether or not the paper will hold up well is always a question.
 
Episode 15, Page 7
 
Image
 
Trying another shadow across the face, but I needed to show facial features, so it had to be lighter, and it was a close-up, so it had to have more detail. Somehow this miraculously came out in what seems to me a fairly effective semi-abstract fashion; the first attempt or two weren't quite right, but dashes and sponging offs and swipes with the finger somehow resulted in things that suggested worn makeup, furrowed brow, and, the capper, an actual fully modeled nose, something I hadn't really done up to that point--and haven't matched since. I know I did a swipe with a paper towel or finger down the bridge of the nose to create that raised, lightened look, and then added just the barest white ink highlights to suggest protruding, glossy skin along the bridge and tip, but...well I still have the feeling that if I really tried doing something like that again fully on purpose it would result in a big muddle. Scaredy-cat! So, yet another thing I should really try to do more.
 
Episode 15 Gallery: Solstice
 
Image
 
This was practice with the new paper I was thinking of switching to: from absorbent but potentially rumpley and hard to scan and sorta yellow (and expensive) Arches watercolor paper to Canson "Illustration" paper. This Canson stuff has an invisible clay or something coating designed to prevent ink from bleeding, and I found in this, which was almost all washes, that the coating can lead to sort of greasy looking patterns in wash areas. Which can be kind of cool, if you're open to it. This was also a rare one where I outlined in gray wash from the start, rather than leading with full black to define the main shapes--it gave a lovely sense of atmosphere and freedom (no enchaining black lines!), and that's one thing I'm trying to work in again here with my latest gray foray.
 
Episode 16, Page 21
 
Image
 
Well into my pen phase, I thought I'd try gray rather than black silhouettes for this view from the dark to the light end of a passageway; PITT calligraphy pen outlines made it pretty easy to keep the shapes in the desired form--a bit of a crutch, but it certainly works. I thought this was pretty successful, and I've been regretting getting away from a working method that could make such gray shadowed shapes possible.
 
Episode 16, Page 42
 
Image
 
I wanted to see if I could get a sense of atmosphere in a space scene by using really dark gray washes rather than full black for the background. The answer is yes, but it can get a bit fiddly if you find yourself having to readjust the edges of major shapes around the dark gray, as I did in attempting to get the planetoid closer to being circular, and then lighting it the right way. In the end I had to try a light *white* ink wash around the rim of the planet to restore a bit of the space/planet atmospheric interface, as it were, and this was frightening but seemed to work pretty well; in fact, since white inks wash slightly blue (whereas black inks wash slightly yellow, if anything), it created an interesting color contrast suggestive of a thin, separate atmosphere around the planetoid--well, in the full-color real life view, anyway. :P
 
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That's about it! A lot of my grays have been disastrous, and there was definitely a period where everything was just *too* gray and dull. So I don't want to fall back into that trap--when in doubt, add black!--but I do want to be able to get the most out of all the grays ink wash can produce; and I think overall a nice gray tone looks better than a lot of black line hatching--well, better than *my* black line hatching, anyhow. :P
 
One idea I had that I tried in today's page was working from light to dark--the opposite of what I've mostly done all along, which is starting with full black ink, then diluting down into washes and filling in the dark grays, then the lighter grays. So this time I started with very light grays, sort of feeling out the shapes, and only brought in full black when I was sure I had some places that needed it. One thing's for sure: you can always go darker! You *can't* really always go lighter, on the other hand, because gray (black) ink washes don't look very good over white ink--they get this weird spotty texture, as you can kind of see in the gray lines on the right of today's page, which are over white ink that I used to cover up some black outlines that weren't working over there. You can try white ink washes to lighten over black ink, as I did in a few very small spots here, but those don't work great over large areas as they come out kind of spotty too.
 
Just for the sake of completeness, I may as well mention that the other main technical trouble with ink washing is that the wash tends to dry lighter than it looks while wet, so you have to get a feel for what what gray will be when dry, and this varies by ink.
 
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Token science time! Researchers at MIT claim to have invented a slick "structured liquid" coating for glass that solves the ages-old problem of getting ketchup to come out of the bottle. WILL THERE BE A GREATER SCIENTIFIC LEAP IN OUR TIME?? Anyway you can see a video of ketchup dregs just flowing straight out of a treated bottle, supposedly, in the article over here.
 
 
 
 
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  All the copyright-free imaged exoplanetsMay 24, 2012 7:51 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Yesterday I got to talking about Beta Pictoris b, a planet around a star 63 light years from Earth that has actually been directly seen by our instruments, at least in the infrared. There is no doubt these days that planets are plentiful in our galaxy; says Wikipedia: "A 2012 study of gravitational microlensing data collected between 2002 and 2007 concludes the proportion of stars with planets is much higher and estimates an average of 1.6 planets orbiting between 0.5–10 AU per star in the Milky Way Galaxy, the authors of this study conclude 'that stars are orbited by planets as a rule, rather than the exception.'"
 
The vast majority of extrasolar planets thought to have been detected so far--767 candidates total, says The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia; the Kepler satellite team, whose mission it is to find planets around other stars, had identified 2,321 *unconfirmed* candidates as of February of this year--have been hinted at only through indirect evidence: as perceived regular wobbles or flickers in their parent star, or the center of what appears to be light bending around a large mass. The very first confirmed exoplanet candidate, for instance, was a pulsar planet--that is, a planet orbiting a pulsar; a pulsar is a rapidly spinning neutron star whose polar jet beams toward us in its sweep, making for a very regular bright blinking light in the heavens; any interruption of variation in the timing of that blinking, due for instance to the gravitational influence of a large planet nearby, is relatively easy to spot, and this was accomplished in 1992, when the first not one but *two* extra-solar planets were deduced to be altering the timing of millisecond pulsar PSR 1257+12. Due to limitations of our planet-finding technology, most exoplanet candidates found to date lie within 300 light years of Earth--quite a tiny space considering the Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across (and contains 200 to 400 billion stars).
 
But while hundreds or thousands of planets around other stars in this small local region have been hinted at, only 31 planets in 27 systems have actually been seen. Like Beta Pictoris b, just about all of them are of the "hot Jupiter" variety: that is, very large gas giants heated to high temperatures by a very close proximity to their parent star; this proximity means an orbital period as low as just a few days, making them easier to spot as regular patterns, and the high mass and temperature makes them possible to pick out in infrared light even across tens or hundreds of light years of space. 1 to 1.5% of all "sunlike" stars are thought to have a "hot Jupiter." Current technology makes spotting smaller, colder planets--like Earth, say--much more difficult; heck, we can still barely even see anything of Pluto from Earth, much less spot any small cold planet 6,000 to 600,000 times further away (about 3 to 300 light years) than that.
 
Also complicating this picture is the question of just what is a planet? There are all sorts of arguments on the small side of things--tiny Pluto being famously declassified as a planet, for instance--but there is confusion on the big side, too, because tradition has it that a "planet" forms from an accretion disc around a star, while a "star" forms from a nebula, and that a "star" undergoes fusion, while a "planet" does not. But free-ranging, apparently non-star bodies have been spotted floating through star clusters, and are thought to be planet-like objects that formed directly from the nebula that birthed the rest of the cluster, rather than from an accretion disc around a star; and bodies reaching about 13 Jupiter masses--11, depending on who you ask and what exotic compositions you admit--are thought to be able to start a fusion reaction thanks to their gravitational pressure, which makes them not a planet but a brown dwarf *star*; brown dwarfs, however, actually only undergo fusion for a small part of their existence, typically--and it's fusion of deuterium (nucleus of 1 proton and 1 neutron), rather than of hydrogen (nucleus of 1 proton) like bigger stars.
 
So is a thing a planet or a star depending on where it is currently, or what it is doing? Well, kinda yeah. The last official ruling on this subject from the IAU ("International Astronomical Union," the Paris-based collection of just over 10,000 active astronomers, of doctorate level or higher, from across the globe who set the "rules" on such crucial semantic issues) came in 2003, and went as follows:
 

1) Objects with true masses below the limiting mass for thermonuclear fusion of deuterium (currently calculated to be 13 Jupiter masses for objects of solar metallicity) that orbit stars or stellar remnants are "planets" (no matter how they formed). The minimum mass required for an extrasolar object to be considered a planet should be the same as that used in our Solar System.
2) Substellar objects with true masses above the limiting mass for thermonuclear fusion of deuterium are "brown dwarfs", no matter how they formed nor where they are located.
3) Free-floating objects in young star clusters with masses below the limiting mass for thermonuclear fusion of deuterium are not "planets", but are "sub-brown dwarfs" (or whatever name is most appropriate).

Oh dear, that doesn't entirely clear things up in all cases, does it?
 
So anyway I thought I would try compiling photos of all the sighted exoplanet candidates (from The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia's list) I could find via simple text search on Wikipedia; I'll accompany these with the name, distance from Earth in light years, estimated mass in Jupiter masses ("MJ"?), and you'll see that a lot of these are in fact in danger of being classed as brown dwarfs rather than planets--and who cares about yet another dull ol' brown dwarf? :P Well, not that many of us care about "hot Jupiters" anyway, I suspect--we're all just waiting for a real Earth-like planet to be found that we--or our distant descendants, rather--can go and trash, yes? :D--but, you know, I like space photos of unusual subjects, so let's do this thing. We'll start with Beta Pictoris b, since I already have that one from yesterday:
 
Beta Pictoris b - 63 ly away, 8 MJ
 
Image
image by ESO/A.-M. Lagrange (source)
 
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2M 1207 b - 172 ly away, 4 MJ
 
Image
image by ESO (source)
 
The "planet" is the red dot, seen in orbit around its brown dwarf star in blue in this composite infrared image.
 
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CHXR 73 b - distance unspecified, 12 MJ
 
Image
image by NASA/ESA/K. Luhman (Penn State University, USA) (source)
 
Hubble image from 2006, "0.1% chance" that the hot Jupiter is just a background object.
 
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2M J044144 b - 450 ly away, 7.5 MJ
 
Image
image by NASA (source)
 
Hubble image; "planet" orbits a brown dwarf less than three times its mass.
 
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AB Pictoris b - 148 ly away, 13.5 MJ
 
Image
image by ESO (source)
 
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GQ Lupi b - 500 ly away, 21.5 MJ
 
Image
image by ESO (source)
 
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CFBDS 1458 b - 75.4 ly away, 6.5 MJ
 
Image
image by Michael Liu, University of Hawaii (source)
 
Since the planet is kind of dwarfy, this is actually a brown dwarf binary, apparently, although the planety one is one of the coolest (temperature) brown dwarfs known. The image is a near-infrared composite.
 
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HR 8799 e, d, c, b - 129 ly away, 9, 10, 10, 7 MJ
 
Image
image by NASA/JPL-Caltech/Palomar Observatory (source)
 
Image
image by Ben Zuckerman (source)
 
That's four hot Jupiters spotted around a single star 1.5 times larger than the Sun; their orbital radii are "2 to 3 times those of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, respectively"; these were discovered in an order different than their order going outward from the star, thus the "e, d, c, b" arrangement of the names--oh man that kind of thing is gonna be really confusing later on :P; the planets are in the inner portion of one of the stellar largest debris discs known within 300 light years--it extends out about 1000 AU:
 
Image
image by NASA (source)
 
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Fomalhaut b - 25 ly away, < 3 MJ
 
Image
image by NASA, ESA, etc (source)
 
This planet is thought to orbit at 115 AU, just inside the inner edge of the star's debris disc. It was the first exoplanet whose position was spotted by irregularities in a debris disc (the disc isn't centered on the star, and the inner edge is unusually sharp), first imaged planet since Neptune whose existence was predicted prior to discovery, and the first spotted in visible light. It was spotted three times by Hubble, the third time--2010--it appeared in an unexpected spot that would require an elliptical path through the debris disc / dust belt, which wouldn't match its theorized effects on the debris--it appeared likely that a second planet outside the disc is keeping things in order; however, even b has not been spotted by another telescope--Spitzer looked for it in near-infrared but found nothing, which was a surprise, and led to suspicions that the thing spotted by Hubble may just have been a dust reflection. But the to-be-massive ALMA radio telescope array (which I talked about back in October) made Fomalhaut one of its first subjects of study, and just confirmed last month that the debris disc (the portion ALMA observed, anyway) has an unusually sharp edge both inside and outside--their observation is seen here superimposed on the Hubble observations in blue:
 
Image
image by ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO). Visible light image: the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope (source)
 
They also included a gorgeous general view of the star from the Digitized Sky Survey:
 
Image
image by NASA, ESA, and the Digitized Sky Survey 2 (source)
 
and a diagram of what they think is going on there:
 
Image
image by Bill Saxton/NRAO/AUI/NSF (source)
 
So was Fomalhaut b actually imaged? Well...probably?
 
Although the Encyclopedia's figure has Fomalhaut b at "less than three" Jupiter masses, ALMA's observations suggest a much, much smaller size range for both possible planets involved in sculpting the debris disc: between "Mars and a few times larger than Earth" masses; larger masses would have totally disrupted the dust belt.
 
~~~~~~~~~~~
 
That was all I could find on Wikipedia of the 31 imaged planets as far as actual images goes! I found a couple other images when I went so far as I peep into referenced scientific researched papers, but I guess those are copywritten and such, alas.
 
If you keep an eye on that Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia, you'll notice the entries are constantly updating--it's a pretty hot field in astronomy now. I think I'm pretty much done with it, at least until we get a really good picture of an exoplanet, or hear of a really really exotic one (there's one Saturn-sized candidate that apparently orbits two stars--a low mass binary system; the planet is referred to as a "circumbinary"--for instance, but eh that wouldn't inspire me to write a news article, I don't think; hm and in my search for photos I found another, directly imaged circumbinary, Ross 458(AB) c (aka "DT Virginis c")), because otherwise we're just looking at little blobs and making all kinds of assumptions based on really, really slim data--the data given for the ones I did find on Wikipedia, for instance, varies so much from the Encyclopedia's list that it isn't even funny (I went with the Encyclopedia on the *assumption* that it is more up to date); and of course we won't get a good picture of one until we fly a probe to one, and even aside from the technical and economic challenge of building such a probe, it couldn't possibly get to one and beam back a photo within our lifetimes...hm so yeah, I don't have to cover exoplanets anymore, yay! :D Of course I don't expect much cessation in the bombardment of pop-sci articles touting a new "alien Earth" exoplanet discovery, complete with exceedingly lush, multi-mooned/starred artist's conception illustration, like a travel agent guidebook or something... Man I'm sick of those. :P
 
(Okay well one system that sounds kind of interesting in theory is KOI-55; it is now a helium-fusing "subdwarf" that will eventually collapse into a super-tiny, super-dense white dwarf, but it is thought that it was a red giant until about 18 million years ago; two or maybe three smaller-than-Earth-sized planets have been spotted (two imaged, but the photos must be copywritten or something :P) in extremely tight orbits around it--like they go around the star in a quarter or a third of an Earth day; they're the shortest-period planets found. "The two planets were most likely gas giants which spiraled inward toward their host star, which subsequently became a red giant, vaporizing much of the planets except for their rocky cores, which we today observe as terrestrial planets orbiting a sdB star.")
 
 
 
 
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  Evolution: Laplacian Planets, Darwinian MoonMay 23, 2012 5:13 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:I've been talking about wacky astronomical theories lately; did you know that for much of the period between the two World Wars, the leading theory for the formation of planets was the tidal theory, which proposed that planets formed from material drawn out of the Sun by another star passing nearby? This funky scheme temporarily replaced what had been the leading theory, the "nebular hypothesis" first proposed by Emanuel Swedenborg in way back in 1734, and further championed by Immanuel Kant in 1755 and Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1796. There was a brief interruption in 1749 when the Count of Buffon proposed that planets were matter knocked out of the Sun by comets, but Laplace managed to show that planets formed in this way would inevitably fall back into the Sun.
 
Sharp guy, that Laplace! Among his many other scientific and mathematical exploits, he speculated that some nebulae seen by telescopes might actually be distant galaxies, 100 years before Edwin Hubble proved this was the case (c. 1923) by observing stars known to have a certain fixed brightness in two of the "nebulae," which we now know as the Andromeda and Triangulum
 
Image
modified from an image by Hewholooks (source)
 
galaxies. And, closer to our particular interests, Laplace promoted the mathematically backed theory that a star of sufficient size would have such a gravitational attraction that even light could not escape; this had first been proposed by a geologist, John Mitchell, in a letter to Henry Cavendish of the Royal Society in 1783:
 

If the semi-diameter of a sphere of the same density as the Sun were to exceed that of the Sun in the proportion of 500 to 1, a body falling from an infinite height towards it would have acquired at its surface greater velocity than that of light, and consequently supposing light to be attracted by the same force in proportion to its vis inertiae, with other bodies, all light emitted from such a body would be made to return towards it by its own proper gravity.

This "dark" or "invisible" star theory was more or less dropped until people started investigating Einstein's general relativity field equations of 1915: Karl Schwarzschild used the equations to describe the gravitational fields of point and spherical masses a few months later; Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, in 1931, used special relativity to show that electron-degenerate matter (particles squooshed together just as tightly as quantum rules allow) above a certain mass is not stable--ie will collapse; and Robert Oppenheimer and others predicted in 1939 that although electron-degenerate matter (which makes up white dwarfs) could collapse but then stabilize as a neutron star (which is pretty much packed neutrons), above about three solar masses, nothing could stop its further collapse--and there you get a black hole, although that term was not used until the '60's, when black holes were more or less accepted as unavoidably real.
 
But back to Laplace and the nebular theory of planetary evolution: in '96--1796, I mean--following Kant's description of nebular collapse under gravity, he theorized that this collapse would form a star at the center with a thin disc of material spinning around it, which would eventually coalesce into planets.
 
Other theories came and went throughout the 1900s in particular, and it wasn't until the '70's that the nebular theory started a comeback, and not until the early '80's that it was really accepted, and this owed a lot to one star in particular: Beta Pictoris:
 
Image
image by NASA, ESA, D. Golimowski (source)
 
In 1983, excess infrared radiation was detected coming from Beta Pictoris by the American, British, and Dutch Infrared Astronomical Satellite, or "IRAS." Beta Pictoris was known to be an A-Type star, which are supposed to radiate most of their energy at the higher-energy, blue end of the spectrum, so an unusual abundance of infrared radiation was thought to indicate the presence of some sort of cooler--energy absorbing--material in the way of the starlight, and this was verified the next year, when the first stellar disc ever seen was imaged around Beta Pictoris.
 
^ That image above is a 2003 Hubble view of Beta Pictoris, showing the primary disc, and a fainter, secondary disc, which may indicate a planet orbiting the star. The black circle in the center is a mask preventing the telescope's instruments from being overwhelmed by direct starlight.
 
Beta Pictoris is a pretty interesting star system! It's only 63.4 light years from Earth, so we have a relatively good view. The star is about 1.75 times as massive as our Sun, but that stellar disc around it is really huge: about 1800 astronomical units on one side, and 1400 AU on the other side--yeah, it's lopsided. The Earth is 1 AU from the Sun--that's the definition of an astronomical unit, which is also about 150 million kilometers, or 92 million miles. 1800 AU would be over halfway to the "inner" Oort Cloud of debris around our solar system (the "outer" goes out perhaps as far as 100,000 AU); by comparison, Jupiter is a bit over 5 AU from the Sun, Saturn about 10, Uranus 20, Neptune 30, and Pluto 40 (to be more precise, it ranges from just below 30 AU to just below 50 in its elliptical orbit).
 
And while that inclined fainter disc--and certain gaps or masses at multiple places in the main disc, as well as red-shifted objects apparently falling into the star--suggest the presence of multiple planets, or at least "planetesimal" proto-planets, one actual planet has been observed, or at least as well observed as you're likely to get over a distance of 63 light years with modern technology and this type of star, which apparently is difficult to study with the radial velocity method usually used to detect exoplanets--and being a young and feisty 8-20 million years old, there's a lot of "noise" making detection of bodies around the star difficult--in fact, there's so much going on there that "material from the Beta Pictoris debris disk is thought to be the dominant source of interstellar meteoroids in our solar system." !! But an object, "Beta Pictoris b," was spotted faintly in near-infrared, first in 2003 on one side of the star, then in 2009 on the other, as demonstrated in this composite diagram:
 
Image
image by ESO/A.-M. Lagrange (source)
 
In 2003 they couldn't exclude the possibility that it was a background star--but then in photos taken in 2008/2009, it had disappeared! Only later in 2009, it reappeared on the other side, and then they knew it had to be a planet.
 
Here it is seen in infrared by the Very Large Telescope in 2008 (this is another composite image: the outer, disc part is reflected light seen in 1996):
 
Image
image by ESO/A.-M. Lagrange et al. (source)
 
The estimated 8-Jupiter-masses planet appears to orbit at a distance of about 8 AU from the star. I do tend to avoid talking about exoplanet "discoveries" in general, since their "detection" usually relies on inference from exceedingly faint indirect observations. So I like that this one was actually imaged directly, even if it was really faint.
 
~~~~~
 
And getting back to the "giant impact hypothesis" supposed by some to explain the formation of our Moon, that idea was born from the 1898 speculations of astronomer and mathematician George Darwin,
 
Image
image by J. Russell & Sons (source)
 
fifth child of Charles, the famed naturalist and proponent of the theory of human evolution. His son George's theory of Moon-volution said that the Moon "spun" off the early, molten Earth as a result of the centrifugal force of Earth's rotation; this gained ground during the Space Race, when American and Soviet lasers bounced off lunar ranging targets showed very precisely that the Moon was in fact slowly moving away from the Earth, something George Darwin had predicted as part of his theory.
 
That theory couldn't quite explain the tremendous force required to get the Moon off of Earth, though, so in the meantime--1946--Harvard professor Reginald Aldworth Daly proposed that it was launched by an impact rather than centrifugal force--this wasn't really taken up until the mid-70's, however.
 
I still think it's silly, but there is some of the history of it!
 
~~~~~
 
I got to the art supply store today! This is the University of Washington Bookstore, to be more specific, and man they've got an amazing selection: not only did they have the specific "Cretacolor Ergonomic" 5.6 mm lead holder I pointed out online yesterday, they had two other models as well, and even a crayon holder! The crayon holder, as I suspected, was indeed even bigger, which is no good; the other two models were a round-wooden-handled Cretacolor, which wasn't as comfortable, and a triangular Koh-I-Noor.
 
So I got the Ergonomic home and tried jamming an old Raphael 8404 size 4 brush into it so that the lead holder could serve as a thicker, easier-to-hold handle. The brush didn't quite fit, of course
 
Image
 
which I had known would happen :D. That's all right, because I could cut the brush handle down to a smaller size to fit into the holder; the fullest width of the handle couldn't quite fit through the holder--not to mention that the handle was too long, but in fact you can screw off the end of the holder, revealing the hollow tube, so that might not have been a problem in itself. The real problem with this scheme, though, turned out to be that the sturdy gripping metal teeth of the holder can't maintain a firm hold on the metal ferrule of the brush--that's the shiny part between the bristles and the wood handle that you actually hold while using the brush--and that's a problem because as a result the closest you can hold the brush with the lead holder is by the wood handle at the end of the ferrule, at which point your hand is too far back from the brush head for precise work. I'd suspected something like that might be the case even if the teeth could hold on the ferrule, but I still think it was worth a shot. Anyway I can take the lead holder back. :)
 
I don't think I'll need such contrivances anyway though because I also got a new drawing board, and after using it to support drawing today's A* page, found my wrist was quite happy! Yay! I was afraid at first that the board, a 20"x26" "Airlite," the smallest they had, was too big; it's nearly as big as my drawing table!
 
Image
 
But that size means that I can work on an A* page sideways (tall), if necessary, and still have the whole thing easily supported across the board's surface. And even though it's large in size, this board is way lighter than my old ~10"x17.5" particle board board dredged up from scrap wood in the basement, because it's hollow! See it isn't a real board, but a construct of wood edges and some kind of firm but very thin woody surface stretched over them--it looks pretty much exactly like the photo of another brand seen close-up here (I paid nearly twice as much for the Airlite >_< which was a bit of sticker shock at the register since they didn't have a price tag on it, buuuut it doesn't have any of the construction problems mentioned by reviewers of those "Helix"-brand boards, so maybe it's a get-what-you-pay-for type of thing (I hope :P)).
 
So it's a pretty sweet board so far. I do find it curious though that the only two kinds of drawing boards I can find being sold now are this relatively thick, hollow kind, and a thin sort which seems like the more obvious construction, except it's got a big hole carved along one edge for a handle, and huge metal clamps along the opposite edge that are suppose to hold your paper--like these. How about not putting holes and things in it and just giving us a good thin board? Man. Art supplies can be silly.
 
Oh that reminds me, the UW Bookstore is actually having a 20%-off sale on fancy writing instruments, and I was tempted into trying out some of the lower-end fountain pens, like the relatively inexpensive ($20-$30) yet well-regarded Kaweco Sport and Lamy Safari. I've been sort of lusting after a fountain pen for a while--after conceiving the notion that I might be able to do A* art with something like one somehow, without scratching the paper as much as a standard dip pen, although subsequent research showed they wouldn't really be useful for scratching and ink reasons, among others--so I was excited to try them out after reading so much about these things online, and...I was underwhelmed. Yeah they've got a kind of smoothness to them that regular pens don't have, except that they do sometimes just decide not to draw part of your stroke--and there's all the fussing with ink and so forth. To show just how undeveloped my actual appreciation for fine writing instruments is, though, I actually liked the $3 cheap plastic Platinum Preppy fountain pen they had there better. :P Still I really have no use for such things, so when it comes to fountain pens I won't really use, I'll just stick with my Platinum Carbon Desk Pen, which never seems to have that not-writing problem, and with its waterproof pigment ink could even, theoretically, be used in actual A* artwork...but probably won't be.
 
~~~~
 
Oh yeah, and that Tom Richmond guy whose article on inking I linked yesterday, from which I got the idea of getting a different drawing board? Well it just so happens a podcast I'd downloaded earlier that day and just got around to listening to today--Tall Tale Radio Episode 133 (TTR is a webcomic/comic podcast)--has an interview with him, and apparently he's, like, the president of the National Cartoonists Society, which is the thing to be in if you're one of those rare syndicated cartoonists. (They're sort of realizing they need to branch out, though, and the interview covers Richmond's spearheading of getting a category of their "Reuben" award dedicated to webcomics.)
 
 
 
 
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  The Vast Polar Structure & not Dark MatterMay 22, 2012 1:45 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Last update I talked about one of the leading silly theories in astronomy having taken a knock based on new studies--that idea being the one saying that the Moon resulted from a "Mars-sized" mystery planet hitting the newly formed Earth, its core sinking into and merging with Earth's, and the other lighter crust stuff blowing off and eventually congealing into the Moon--a big reason for the existence of this theory being measurements indicating that the Moon has an unusually low-metal core. I'm a big believer that the simplest explanation is usually the best, and while I don't have my own particular theory about the Moon's formation, I do know that hitting the Earth with a whole other planet is not a simple explanation. Well then, imagine my further delight when an even bigger silly theory in astrophysics, again based on trying to make measurements add up by inventing something completely out of the blue, took another big knock: that theory being the whole "Dark Matter" business.
 
Dark Matter, as far as I understand it, came out of calculations showing that the stuff we can see in the universe around us doesn't add up to nearly enough stuff to fit our current best model of the universe, the big bang and all that--the conclusion being that there must be a whole lot of stuff out there we can't see. That sounds plausible enough; the problem came, maybe, when people really latched onto this sexily named "Dark Matter" and started making up whole cosmologies about it being this mystical new energy substance permeating the universe and explaining everything; it's hard to go a month without seeing some new pop sci article about some new dark matter simulation showing how such and such galaxies might do blah-de-blah. That's great and all but it's all founded on missing pieces and inference--yet a lot of people have been getting carried away about it and, perhaps worse, convincing a lot of other people, even scientists, that "Dark Matter" was pretty much a done deal--never mind that we've never even caught a glimpse of the stuff, and no, gravitational lensing around blobs we can't see scattered far off in intergalactic space doesn't really count as far as I'm concerned. :P
 
So I'm very, very glad to see this astrophysics research paper: The VPOS: a vast polar structure of satellite galaxies, globular clusters and streams around the Milky Way. In it, its authors, from the University of Bonn, in Germany, describe the discovery of this:
 
video on Youtube
 
That's a basically a roughly disc-shaped group of globular clusters, star streams, and "tidal" dwarf galaxies that appears to be orbiting the Milky Way, but nearly perpendicular to the galactic plane, and extending as much as twenty times farther out than the Milky Way's starry arms.
 
Boy! That's certainly something. What's it doing there? Well, their best guess is that it's debris from a collision, or near collision, between the Milky Way and another large galaxy about 10 billion years ago. MAN. The paper says:
 

We suggest that the MW has experienced a near-polar collision with an approximately perpendicularly oriented disc galaxy. Figure 6 illustrates this geometry with images of observed interacting galaxies and two model snapshots. They show that polar interactions of perpendicularly oriented disc galaxies happen even at the current epoch and result in tidal debris distributed in a polar structure.
 
The initial interaction could have been a fly-by of two galaxies or it might have ended in a galaxy-merger, destroying the infalling galaxy in the process. In a major merger, the two colliding galaxies will form a spheroidal object. As this event must have happened about 10 Gyr ago, the MW disc might have re-formed from gas accreted later (Hammer et al. 2005), with the spheroidal component being the bulge of the MW today. Ballero et al. (2007) estimate that the MW bulge must have formed rapidly on a time scale of 0.1 Gyr, in favour of a merger-induced origin. However, also in a fly-by encounter material stripped from the passing galaxy would be accreted onto the MW, possibly producing a bulge component. A bar instability would in any case channel gas onto radial orbits.
 
If the TDGs were not formed in a merger but in a flyby encounter, the passing galaxy still has to be nearby. Two candidates can be found in the Local Group: Andromeda and the LMC.

They go on to cite previous studies into the possibility of our satellite galaxies being the result of close encounters with the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the classic 12 satellite galaxies of the Milky Way, and about 1% of its mass, as well as the Andromeda Galaxy, which is much further away (2.6 million light years), predicted to encounter (or re-encounter?) the Milky Way in about 4.5 billion years, and the member of the Local Group of galaxies with the most stars--1 trillion, about twice as much as the Milky Way--but strangely, recent studies have shown it to be perhaps only roughly equal to the Milky Way in mass.
 
That must mean the Milky Way has more Dark Matter! Well, no, says this study--that matter can be found in all these newly discovered dwarf galaxies in the disc above and below the Milky Way, and, furthermore, that disc contradicts the prediction of the best Dark Matter "models," which call for the stuff to be distributed around the outskirts of the Milky Way in a nice spherical, mystical "halo."
 
So, sorry, Dark Matter! This actual debris disc is much more interesting, AND much more convincing--well, I can't speak for scientists, but it certainly is for the layman such as I. I'm sure Dark Matter proponents will regroup and come up with some way around this problem, just as the Loonies have done with the study showing the Moon is made of the same stuff as Earth, and probably not a mystery planet's crust, but hopefully it will get at least *some* research directed back toward actual stuff.
 
~~~~~~
 
(I suppose you could ask why I like that Milky-Way-hit-by-other-galaxy theory but detest the Earth-hit-by-other-planet theory, when they're roughly similar methods of explaining things, in a way. I guess a) the galaxy theory actually points to existing candidates for the hitter, whereas the planet theory has nothing to point to, except to say that the planet was neatly swallowed up into the Earth and the Moon, b) there really isn't another way to explain that huge disc of dwarf galaxies, plus it fits with what we can see in other galactic collisions, whereas with the Moon, there *are* other, less complicated explanations, even if they aren't completely worked out yet either, and c) the galaxy thing would solve more questions than it raises--it would help explain Andromeda's own distribution of satellite galaxies, for instance, and its relative lack of mass--whereas the planet one...well, wouldn't such an impact just have destroyed the Earth--blown it apart, I mean? Or at least affected its mass/velocity enough to knock it into a different orbit and, in general, just throw the planet way, way out of whack? And where would other planet have come from, anyhow, and why would it have crossed paths with the Earth? Etc! Well okay I should stop arguing so much about things I really don't know anything about, yeah. I'm just an artist, damn it! :P)
 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
I came across a pretty good article on inking by MAD Magazine, etc artist Tom Richmond, in which he gives a detailed study of his work inking a large illustration.
 
He also shows how he uses his drawing board--propped up between his lap and the edge of his drawing table--and this has made me think I should go by the art supply store tomorrow and pick up an actual proper drawing board, because the one I have now isn't very long, which means that when I prop it on my legs to draw, it's leaning off a point about mid-thigh, instead of back near my body, at the top of the thigh--and I think this is becoming a problem, because it means my drawing arm isn't braced along a flat surface from elbow to brush, so my wrist is being bent downward; anyway, once in a while, like after today's intense feathering of all those little shadow lines, my wrist will be hurting, and that isn't cool. So we'll try a real art board!
 
I've also been thinking that maybe a wider grip on my brush would help--wider grips are supposed to take less energy to hold, anyway--but I can't find anything like add-on wide gripper things for brushes as exist for, say, pencils. So I think I'll get some kneaded erasers (they're sort of thick, grey, silly-puttyish stuff you can mold) to put around the narrow grip area of my brush--if a real drawing board doesn't completely solve the wrist thing, anyway. I'm also wondering if maybe I could fit the brush itself--possibly with the non-bristle end sawed off short--into a 5.6 mm lead holder. My size 4 Raphael 8408 brush is about 5 mm at its widest handle point, although it narrows to closer to 2mm down near the bristles, which is where you actually want to hold it. So, not sure that would work, but if it did, then I'd have a nice thick handle! Hm there's also things like crayon or chalk holders, but those seem to be even bigger; the chalk one is for 3/8th inch diameter chalk, whereas my brush is about 1/4 inch. So I'm not convinced those would work. You'd *think* someone would make an add-on wider grip for brush handles, but darned if I can find one.
 
~~~~~~
 
Here's a sketch I did over the weekend with the Pentel Pocket Brush--I was reminded of it when I read superhero comic book inker Hilary Barta saying he inks with the similar Pentel Color Brush in Gary Martin's "The Art of Comic-Book Inking" that someone just got me off my A* Amazon Wish List last week. :) Barta gets really sharp lines with his, though (he just dips it in his own ink rather than using Pentel's cartridges--which would seem to defeat the purpose for which most people use brush pens, ie their portability, but he says he just likes their wider grip (I can see that!) and that they're cheaper than sable brushes). You'd think a pro who gets like $100 per inked page wouldn't mind paying $20 or something for a nice sable brush that would last them probably fifty pages or so, but I guess you gotta save money wherever you can. :P
 
Oh right, the sketch:
 
Image
 
If you cover up the nostrils and mouth, which were drawn early on, when I thought I was doodling the face head-on instead of slightly to the side (faces have a way of twisting on me if I'm not being careful :P), then it looks pretty okay! I like how the secondary-light-source type shading came out, anyway, and the hair. Maybe a soft, mushy brush like the Pentel is actually good for those! It is pretty handy for quick, small brush doodles, at least.
 
Here's what's on the back of today's A* page:
 
Image
 
That big part in the lower middle was the first layout I did for the page, but it ended up feeling a little too square-on Selenis' back--she's blocking the view of the knife, for one thing, and it's a bit too balanced to feel really dynamic. So I knew I'd flip the page over and start again on the other side, but first I used of some of the remaining space on this first side in practicing other layouts--the one in the upper right was the one I fixed on to try.
 
 
 
 
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  Moon story gets sillier; invert palm strikeMay 19, 2012 12:08 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:A* reader Latrans, whose nifty A* art inverts you may recall, hit upon one of a recent page that came out particularly niftily:
 
Image
 
~~~~~
 
A chunk has been knocked out of the silly yet persistent notion that the Moon was created by debris from a primordial collision between the Earth and a made-up Mars-sized planet; the story goes that the core of that planet sank into the Earth's, but the light stuff was blown off and gathered in orbit to form the Moon.
 
Sound kind of dumb? I think it does, and I don't know why real scientists would spend their time trying to disprove such a ludicrous idea, but some of them have, comparing the isotopic ratios of titanium found in Moon and Earth material; these ratios tend to vary quite a bit among asteroids and other bodies that formed in different areas of the solar system, so the thinking is that if the shell of another planet blew off after hitting Earth and formed the Moon, then the Moon should have a different isotopic signature than the Earth. (It occurs to me that if parts of that made-up planet went into both Moon and Earth, then maybe they would even out, but what do I know--anyway I don't believe any such thing could have happened. :P)
 
Their finding? The isotopic signatures of the Moon and Earth are pretty much identical. So this rules out some of the relatively more straightforward Earth + mystery planet = Moon ideas. Still, according to that linked article, proponents of the idea have already switched tactics and proposed other outlandish explanations to support their mystery planet.
 
Why are some people so dedicated to believing in another planet knocking the Moon out of Earth on extremely scanty "evidence"? You got me. Obviously, a vast conspiracy is afoot! =P
 
 
 
 
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  Coils from Mars, cheaper A* T-shirts =oMay 18, 2012 2:18 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:A tweet tipped me off to this article about funny coil patterns found by an Arizona State graduate student looking through high resolution photos sent back by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter via its HiRISE camera ("High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment"), "built under the direction of the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp." Student Andrew Ryan has counted "about 269 of these lava coils just in one region on Mars, Cerberus Palus":
 
Image
image by NASA/JPL/University of Arizona (source)
 
So yeah they're thought to be patterns of dried lava; such coil patterns occur here on Earth, on the surface of lava floes on the island of Hawai'i. Says Ryan: "The coils form on flows where there’s a shear stress – where flows move past each other at different speeds or in different directions." The Martian lava coils are bigger than terrestrial ones; the largest found on Mars so far has been about 30 meters / 100 feet across (neither the article nor Wikipedia will tell me how big Hawai'ian ones get, though :P). That photo above covers an area about 500 meters across ("1640 feet").
 
HiRISE, incidentally, is a pretty powerful camera: weighing 64.2 kg, it consists of "a 0.5 m (19.7 in) aperture reflecting telescope, the largest so far of any deep space mission, which allows it to take pictures of Mars with resolutions of 0.3 m/pixel (about 1 foot), resolving objects below a meter across." And it turned around and took this pretty keen photo of Earth and its Moon from the orbit of Mars in 2007 (it had achieved Martian orbit in March 2006):
 
Image
image by NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona (source)
 
~~~~~~
 
A* T-shirts are more affordable than ever! Well okay I've only got the nice minimalistic A* logo T-shirt in the A* store, but it is now a spiffy $16, down from $18. $14.40 of that $16 goes to the print-on-demand T-shirt manufacturer, so eh I guess you don't have to worry about me retiring on T-shirt profits any time soon ;). Anyway I was looking at it because I'm thinking of adding some more T-shirt designs, and I'll want to order them first to make sure they come out right, and I didn't want to have to pay $18 per shirt, even if some of it would work its way back to me eventually (in theory) :P. So yeah, (relatively) cheap T-shirts! Take that, internet! I'll let you know when the new designs are up, of course--probably be a week or two before I can get the prototypes shipped to me so I can check 'em over.
 
 
 
 
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  Supermassive Andromeda; Lockhart's LamentMay 17, 2012 2:16 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:~~~~~~
 
Came across this NASA illustration of the Andromeda galaxy's core structure, as it was understood in 2005:
 
Image
illustration by NASA, ESA and A. Schaller (for STScI) (source)
 
The caption reads:

This artist's concept shows a view across a mysterious disk of young, blue stars encircling a supermassive black hole at the core of the neighboring Andromeda Galaxy (M31). The region around the black hole is barely visible at the center of the disk. The background stars are the typical older, redder population of stars that inhabit the cores of most galaxies. Spectroscopic observations by the Hubble Space Telescope reveal that the blue light consists of more than 400 stars that formed in a burst of activity about 200 million years ago. The stars are tightly packed in a disk that is only a light-year across. Under the black hole's gravitational grip, the stars are traveling very fast: 2.2 million miles an hour (3.6 million kilometers an hour, or 1,000 kilometers a second).

Also in 2005, the supermassive black hole at the center of Andromeda was estimated to be between 110 and 230 *million* solar masses--quite a bit bigger than A*'s ~ 4 million! So it can definitely sling stars around faster than our own galactic core can.
 
In 1993, Hubble had imaged Andromeda's core, revealing what appeared to be a two-lobe structure:
 
Image
image by NASA (source)
 
It's the darker of the two lobes that is actually the true center containing the supermassive black hole; the bright lobe is thought to be "a disk of stars in an eccentric orbit around the central black hole." Keep in mind though that the red filter used for that photo would not have captured the bright blue stars at the galactic center, which would explain why the core looks comparatively dim.
 
In 2000 (I think?) the Chandra X-ray telescope had taken a crack at Andromeda's core:
 
Image
image by NASA (source)
 
The intensity of the X-ray source in the center revealed what almost had to be a million-solar-mass-class supermassive black hole in there, while various other X-ray sources around it were attributed to X-ray binaries: stars being sucked into nearby compact objects such as white dwarfs, neutron stars, or black holes; "infalling matter releases gravitational potential energy, up to several tenths of its rest mass, as X-rays."
 
("Andromeda" was also the name of a mysterious central character in the 1961 BBC miniseries, "A for Andromeda": radio signals from "a distant galaxy" gave instructions for constructing an advanced computer, which in turn created a humanoid organism, played by Julie Christie. Sounds interesting! But! "As was common practice at the time, the BBC's copies of the serial were junked after broadcast and the bulk of the serial remains missing to this day." Jeez!)
~~~~~~
 
An interview with me about working on A* just went up on the Evan Yeti Community Blog, in which, among other things, I reveal my plans (in hindsight, maybe I shouldn't have revealed them just yet... >_>) for galactic domination via webcomics.
 
Evan Yeti is also the name of (warning: sound) a webcomic made by the interviewer, concerning the adventures of a yeti (aka "abominable" snowman) named Evan.
 
~~~~~~
 
An engineer friend sent me a link to (PDF format) Lockhart's Lament, an article admirably advocating teaching math as an art, rather than just a bunch of formulas to memorize and use on meaningless numbers. It was written (my source is this) by mathematician and teacher Paul Lockhart in 2002, and I have to say that if I had been taught math the way he's proposing...I'd probably remember a lot more beyond basic algebra than I do now. :P
 
~~~~~~~
 
I've been reading the beginning of Gary Martin's The Art of Comic Book Inking that a miraculously wonderful reader got for me off my now-empty A* Amazon Wish List, and it's starting to become clear to me, even hilariously so, that what I'm doing on A* these days is almost the exact opposite of traditional comic book inking. For instance, one particular pet peeve of Martin's is inkers who get exterior line weights wrong--using thick lines to delineate the side of the figure illuminated by the light source, and thinner lines on the shaded side. And--today's A* page being a prime example--I seem to do that almost all the time, to a ridiculous degree. I have no idea why! I kind of like it that way, though. :P Maybe because it sort of creates a tension with the heavy black shadows on the interior of the figure? Or probably just because I have no idea what I'm doing! :D
 
And there's a passage where he says of working with a brush that you shouldn't, for instance, use it to draw a nostril in a single stroke; rather, you should outline the nostril, then fill it in, as this will help you preserve the shape established by the pencils. And I had to sort of chuckle to myself at that, since I'm going straight to ink and skipping pencils, and a single stroke is like the only way I ever draw nostrils.
 
Not that I am saying I'm doing things the right way; in fact, it's kind of nice to know I'm doing them exactly the wrong way. It's easier to break the rules once you know them, so I'm finding this book quite interesting! Seriously though, I guess the way I'm working now--straight off with ink on the blank page--has a lot more in common with painting than with traditional comic inking. I did a good deal of painting (way) back in college, so I suppose that's probably why this method feels much more comfortable to me. Except that sometimes I find myself reverting to an inking/illustrating-style arm position--resting half the palm on the table or drawing board--which I really shouldn't do because somehow I mess it up and lean on it or something and it makes my forearm and wrist sore. What I *mean* to do is to have the whole arm off the paper, like a painter does when working on a canvas. Sometimes I get this right but it seems like I have a tendency to relapse into resting it on the drawing surface when I'm doing a whole lot of (relatively) detailed little lines. Hm HM Hm. Well some day maybe I will figure this all out.
 
 
 
 
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  Goodies from A* readers, gosh!May 16, 2012 3:02 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Man! Today was a pretty awesome day thanks to A* readers. :D First, I was surprised to find a package on my porch as I went out today, 'cause I couldn't recall having ordered anything recently. And I hadn't, but it was the last item from the A* Amazon Wish List: Gary Martin's The Art of Comic Book Inking. Man! That's three out of three wish list things A* readers bought for me. :D Thanks to this latest lovely wish-fulfiller, and those of wishes past. :DD (More about the book below.)
 
And then an A* reader who just happens to live right down the street from me (what are the odds??) had me over for ice cream. Yep! All the other webcomic authors are jealous now, I bet. (So if you live near a webcomic author, do invite them over for iced cream--they will probably be pretty happy about it.)
 
It's a lame kind of thank you to all my lovely readers but um well I've had this sketch laying around for a while now 'cause I was too lazy to get it electronicized, but now I have done it! Behold:
 
Image
 
That was from way back when I got some Copic Multiliner markers and kind of went nuts with the tiny lines and cross hatchings in this sketch. I filled in the larger black areas with a brush. I think I decided after this trial that I wouldn't do *quite* that much crosshatching again; you can get kind of an olde stylee engraving effect with a ton of crosshatching, but it also sort of freezes the subject in place as the linear energy is all crossed over itself.
 
Oh yeah I wanted to talk more about ice cream! No wait about The Art of Comic Book Inking! Based on an initial skim-through, it's an even niftier book than I'd suspected. The first part goes in-depth about the nuts and bolts of inking, and then it goes into loads of examples of actual penciled comic pages, each inked by a bunch of different artists--and each of them then discuss in quite a bit of detail what their idea for the inking of that page was, exactly what tools they used on it, and how they did the whole thing. Each different inking gets a full page picture and full page explanation, and it's easy and quite interesting to flip between and compare the results. And then, the last part of the book is taken up by folded-over full-size comic Bristol boards with the same pencil examples printed on them in "non-photo" blue, so you can have a go at inking them your own self, if you want! I dunno if I'll do that, since I'd rather spend that time on my own stuff, but it's neat to see what a standard penciled comic page kinda looks like. One of the pages is even a Jack Kirby drawing! It doesn't have that fine subtle shading that I talked about seeing in a video of other work of his yesterday, though, so I dunno if that shading I thought I saw was real or not. I'll have to see if I can find some good photos or scans of his work online that have it--maybe I was just imaging it. :P
 
 
 
 
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  Art of Jack Kirby, Travis Charest, Jae LeeMay 15, 2012 2:18 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Over the weekend I found myself watching this:
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoXeiEXJrgc
 
It seems like at least partially a Marvel Comics-produced effort as it focuses on Jack Kirby's time at Marvel, and isn't reluctant to pile both him and Marvel to the ceiling with praise, but there are still some interesting things to be found in there. I hadn't known Kirby worked in animation and strips early on, for instance, and you get to hear about how he worked, what his peers thought of him, and so forth, oh and they have some interesting insights from other Marvel artists, including some whose work I like a lot—people like Walt Simonson and Neal Adams.
 
Although his "blocky" style certainly looked as though it followed the geometric construction techniques described in Stan Lee and John Buscema's well-known 1978 guide, How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, to hear the eyewitnesses in this video tell it, Kirby, legendary for churning out five or whatever full comic pages in a single day when necessary, appears to have drawn with little or no preliminary layout phase—just going straight from blank page to final pencils, and not necessarily doing those in any sort of structured order, but maybe putting in a hand here, a head here, and so on until they all connected.
 
That explains why his proportions were sometimes a bit loosey-goosey, and eh well it sounds kind of like how I'm drawing A* now, frighteningly enough. Come to think of it in fact, on today's page I drew the shoulders, then the hands, then the arms in between them—all directly in ink with no preliminary sketching, of course. >_> I can't say I recommend drawing this way (and I'm unbelievably worse / slower at it than Kirby, certainly!)...but it is kind of fun. ;)
 
Kirby, mind you, mostly worked in pencil, leaving the inking part to be completed by others as he churned away on more and more pages—which, from the looks of the many penciled pages they show in this video, is in some ways a real shame, because his pencil work has a really gorgeous, subtle range of tone in it that was ENTIRELY lost in the flat and minimalistic inking that was usually laid over it; just look at his pencil renderings of the Thing (the orange rocky guy in the Fantastic Four) in there, for instance: almost every little flat facet of his body is carefully shaded in a slightly different tone of gray, yielding a really great volumetric effect—pretty much reduced to black and white by whoever would come along and ink it, no doubt. Jeepers.
 
Oh, and all those times in the video that people say Kirby invented that "Kirby Krackle" bubbly energy effect—well, he very well could have come up with it on his own, but similar patterns had been used by others to illustrate space energy in comics well before Kirby popularized it in the States.
 
~~~~~
 
I have some other artists I've been wanting to talk about for a while so I may as well do it now! I've mentioned Travis Charest's "Spacegirl" before—a single wide black and white panel science fiction comic :o—and some time after that I found his blog, which is conveniently called Travis Charest's Spacegirl. There you'll find links to semi-recent continuations he's made in his Spacegirl story, new stuff about what he's working on these days, and links to other slideshows of his work, including a fascinating compilation of his art from the Weapons of the Metabaron graphic novel, as well as some of his older work on Jim Lee's Wildstorm Comics series, WildC.A.T.s.
 
But not...a whole lot else. See, Charest's career took an unusual twist when, in 2000, just as his hyper-detailed, bold pencil and ink work had been getting him noticed in American comics, Charest...moved to France. From what little I know of European comics, they emphasize a rather more fantastic artistry than one finds in the typical American superhero comic style, and I suspect that's what attracted Charest, whose style was starting to go beyond the norm over here. So he went to France, started work on the latest graphic novel in this "Metabarons" series...and seven years or so later, he had about thirty pages done.
 
That's about a page every three months—not exactly a Kirby-esque page rate. :P If you look at the Metabaron art in his slideshow, you'll see that it is incredibly detailed, but still, that isn't going to keep a publisher satisfied at the rate of one of those pages every ninety days. So the second half of the book was finished by someone else (the difference in art was explained away—apparently somewhat awkwardly—as a flashback sequence or something), and Charest came back to the States, where he's finally started working on a few comic pieces here and there.
 
Charest's weapon of choice is the Rapidograph technical pen, and finding that out was what got me interested in the things, as I thought gee it would be super if I could get so detailed and cross-hatchy like he does. And his ink wash, like he did with Metabaron, is done with "Rapidograph" ink, which I *think* is probably Ultradraw like I tested recently. Even so, the slow, patient movements the Rapidograph requires are not for me, as I discovered, so I have to admire what he can do with it all the more. Hopefully he'll keep Spacegirl going too!
 
~~~~~~~
 
In my ink device investigations I had someone mention to me that artist Jae Lee had inked with a razor. That mystified me for a while—how would you get ink flowing down the blade? :o—but I guess maybe what that meant was using the blade to shave away bits of black inked paper surface, to create white blast effects and the like, as demonstrated in this video. Maybe?
 
I can't say I found a definite example of that Jae Lee's work online, but I did find a pretty neat sequence that he did almost entirely in a stark black and white silhouette style. Punchy!
 
 
 
 
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  Vintage film star photos from my art openingMay 12, 2012 7:07 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:The group art show opening tonight was a whole lot of fun! And one of my two pieces even got bought on the spot--okay so it was a very generous friend of my mother, but hey. :D Also they had some really nice refreshments AND they gave me a free cup of their delicious hot chocolate. And there was hob-nobbing and art materials talking (one guy used to run an art supply store!) with the other artists, not to mention getting to hang out with the shop owners and their visitors. Oh and they had a constant custom soundtrack spinning from a multitude of old vinyl albums, like oh say, this one from this. Ha! We are talking some good times!
 
I also scored some stuff I can actually share with you! The theme of the group show was "portraits," and among the exhibits were piles and piles of old film studio publicity shots--mostly from the early '50's, but some going back into the '30's (and a few from the '70s but the less said about those the better ;P). After I'd almost poured through all of them, one of the owners mentioned they were for sale (and placed the price tag among them :P -- $5 a piece or I think it was $20 for six), so of course I had to root back through them to dig out my favorites to claim as my own--and now I'm scanning them and showing them to you!
 
The first one that really struck me was this one, because it was one of the few in which I actually recognized the person:
 
Image
 
Yes it's Nova Pilbeam! I've seen her an early Alfred Hitchcock movie--back when he was still in England, you know: the 1937 film Young and Innocent. She did a bang-up job in a starring role in that, and although I'm pretty terrible with names I think I remembered hers because it's so unusual. Heck it's almost super-sci-fi at that: just change it to oh Nova Drillbeam for instance and away you go.
 
What I found especially amusing was what someone--at some time--had written on the back:
 
Image
 
Well *I* think it's a super name, and she's a good actress. She was just 17 at the time Young and Innocent was made, and I realize now I'd seen her--but hadn't known anything about her, or realized it was her later--a bit earlier, as she has a smaller role in Hitchcock's 1934 film The Man Who Knew Too Much. Mrs. Pilbeam, who is still with us at the sterling age of 92, left acting in 1949, before she'd even reached 30, so her body of work is pretty brief! And the only clue as to what year this photo might have been taken was that it was from "GB Pictures," which a little searching turned up must have been the British studio Gainsborough Pictures (closed in 1951).
 
... Okay so the other clue was the actual "NOV 29 1936" stamped on the back, but I'd forgotten about that. >_> So I compared the list of Mrs. Pilbeam's movies with the movies produced by Gainsborough, and the only overlap was the 1936 film Tudor Rose (called Nine Days a Queen when it came to the States, since obviously we can't be expected to know what a "tudor" is :P), in which she played Lady Jane Grey. That publicity shot isn't exactly period clothing, so I guess it was just a general shot around that time for their "Junior Star" lineup or something.
 
As a bit of a personal aside, Gainsborough was widely known in England--apparently--for their "series of morally ambivalent costume melodramas" that ran from 1942 to '46 (including 1945's flamboyantly ambivalent The Wicked Lady, which Queen Mary surprised everyone in thoroughly enjoying despite the scandalously low necklines of its period dresses, which were hugely censored in the US release and I guess maybe that still accounts for it being pretty impossible to find in a modern region 1 release ;_;) largely sharing a concentrated cast of stars, one of whom was the marvelously wicked lady Margaret Lockwood who, as it happens, beat out Nova Pilbeam for the leading role in Hitchcock's (and Gainsborough's) 1938 The Lady Vanishes, which very well could be my favorite movie of all time. Would it have been as good or even gooder if Mrs. Pilbeam had been the star? It's hard to imagine but I'll try!
 
~~EDIT 2: The Lady Vanishes is claimed by archive.org to be in the public domain, and you can watch it there. I wonder if this means the other Gainsborough Pictures films are public domain as well... Tudor Rose/Nine Days a Queen and The Wicked Lady have been released on VHS, and Region 2 DVD in the latter's case, but all by different companies--so maybe they *are*! But they aren't on archive.org at any rate, alas.~~
 
~~EDIT 3: Ah, although a Federal Register Notice of 1997 ordered US copyrights restored on The Lady Vanishes and Tudor Rose based on an overseas copyright claim by Carlton Film Distributors, Ltd (producers of The Wicked Lady region 2 DVD). So technically it probably shouldn't still be on archive.org. =p And I wonder if this means Carlton also has the rights to Gainsborough production photos from the time? Well if you are from Carlton lemme see the paperwork and I can take the photos down. :D~~
 
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The other photo that really struck me was much more mysterious because I had no idea who it was, but it sure was a nice photo:
 
Image
 
The only clue (really) this time aside from the image itself was the small print copyright notice at the bottom (and yeah it is partially out of focus in the print, oddly): "Copyright © 1957, Loew's Incorporated. Permission granted for Newspaper and Magazine reproduction. Made in U.S.A."
 
Well I guess I might be in trouble with Loew's Incorporated since I'm not quite a Newspaper or Magazine--except that Loew's Incorporated hasn't existed since I think 1959, when the 1948 Supreme Court Ruling in the film-studio-system-busting United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. case finally resulted in splitting it from its film production arm, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer ("MGM"), which Marcus Loew had formed in 1924 by merging Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures and Louis B. Mayer Productions with his line of theaters, Loew's Theatres Incorporated. The remaining Loew's Corporation was otherwise just a holding corporation for various non-film business activities when Tri-Star Pictures (jointly Coca-Cola, CBS, and Time) "acquired" their theater chain in 1985. In '88, Tri-Star (now just Coca-Cola) merged with Columbia Pictures (which Coca-Cola had let go the previous year) to form Columbia Pictures Entertainment. Sony bought Columbia from Coca-Cola in '89 and merged it with Cineplex Odeon Corporation in 1998, resulting in Loews Cineplex Entertainment...which declared bankruptcy in 2001 due to Cineplex's inherited financial problems. It was bought by several corporations in 2002, who then sold it to "investors" in 2004...who succeeded in merging it into AMC Theatres in 2005. So AMC Theatres, if you need me to take this image down, let me know.
 
~~EDIT: Oh wait! I was probably looking at the wrong side of that--maybe it would be the MGM side that has the rights. Their lineage up 'til now is *slightly* less convoluted--in the hands of various moguls in the late '60's, acquired United Artists in 1981, owned by Ted Turner for 74 days in 1986 (he had financial troubles :p)--oh! Except he held onto their film and television library. Okay, so Ted Turner, let me know if you need me to take the photo down. :)~~
 
MGM released 32 movies in 1957 (can you imagine???), and perusing the 26 about which Wikipedia has information and then looking up their female stars, the best likeness seemed to be in the April 3rd, Dean Martin (<3) vehicle (his first movie after breaking with Jerry Lewis, as a matter of fact) Ten Thousand Bedrooms: Anna Maria Alberghetti. I wasn't sure it was her at first but these production photos of her with Dino seemed pretty close--except the dress wasn't the same. But then I spotted her coming out of the cathedral at the end of the movie in the dress from my photo so yep, it's definitely Italian actress Anna Maria Alberghetti, still active at age 75. :)
 
~~~~~
 
One other interesting thing about these old publicity photos was that "exploitation" seemed to have a different meaning back then; some of them had labels with wording along the lines of "FOR EXPLOITATION ONLY."
 
Oh yeah, and they would also touch up the photos with white or black ink to make highlights, shadows, or profiles pop a little more, or to adjust the cropping, for when the photo would be reproduced in shrunk-down form in newspaper articles--the actual original ink touch-ups were on a few of them!
 
 
 
 
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  Art show opens tonight; Mayans and Halo JonesMay 11, 2012 4:19 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:The group art show I'm in opens tomorrow--er, tonight...Friday May 11th from 6-9 pm, at any rate! I will be milling around trying to look like I know what I'm talking about with the other artists, probably, so I will be ripe for the plucking if you want to stop by and bend my ear for a while. :) There will be lots of artists and art to see in this "portrait"-themed group show (my dad has a couple photos there!), so it should be a lot of fun!
 
This is all at the Chocolat Vitale fancy chocolate drink shop in Seattle's Phinney neighborhood:
 
Image
 
My contribution is a signed and framed print from my digital A* days, as well as one from "The Princess and the Giant." So probably nothing you haven't seen before, BUT there will be lots to see from other artists, and probably loads to talk about. Probably also free tasty snacks of some sort, if you get there before the starving artists snarfle them all! :d
 
Also keep in mind I'm going to be having a solo show at this same location a month from now--yep, I'll have the place all to myself then! That's when I'll have a bunch of stuff on show, particularly original A* ink wash paintings, yay. =) There is a little more info about these shows here.
 
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Private company SpaceX just showed off their "Dragon" space capsule at the "first annual Spacecraft Technology Expo" (hm convenient! :D) at the LA Convention Center. There's a photo in that linked article, but eh it just kinda looks like a rounded-off and smoothed-out Apollo capsule, really. BUT the interesting parts start soon: on May 19th, one is flying up to the International Space Station on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. This trial flight will just be carrying cargo to the station, but it will (if successful) mark the first time a commercial spacecraft has docked with the ISS. And of course THE DRAGON (man it would be way cooler if they painted it with scales or something :|) is really intended for manned spaceflight, so the idea is for it to go on to bigger and bolder things, providing it passes little tests like this one.
 
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A workshop apparently used by ancient Mayan astronomers has just been found among "a large complex of Mayan ruins in the rain forest at Xultun in northeastern Guatemala." The walls of the 6-foot square room are covered with 1,200-year-old astronomical tables and figures in the Mayans' complicated calendar and numbering system, and include calculations of dates spanning about 6000 years; these newly discovered astronomical tables are by far the oldest found so far--600 years older than the previously oldest known ones. The article has some photos!
 
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A* forum poster AndToBeLoved just pointed out a surprisingly A*-esque comic series that ran from 1984 to 1986 in the British "2000 AD" comic magazine: writer Alan Moore and artist Ian Gibson's The Ballad of Halo Jones. Looks pretty neat! It's new to me but the resemblance probably isn't all that coincidental, as glimpses I've been getting over the past couple years of other, older British adventure serials--Jeff Hawke, primarily, and also tiny bits of things like Dan Dare and Garth--have increasingly been inspiring my work on A*. Those old strips really had something special about them--zest, spirit, and wonder combined with absolutely superb and even daring artwork--and they certainly seemed to have inspired a good deal of this latter-day "Halo Jones" as well.
 
(Let me not forget to mention that AndToBeLoved happens to be the writer of a couple fine webcomics: the eponymous young adult tale (some mature language) And To Be Loved, and the classic newspaper strip format humor comic, My Girlfriend's Dog.)
 
Halo Jones herself even looks remarkably Selenic in certain ways, if I may say so. Artist Ian Gibson's account of his side of her creation is an interesting read.
 
~
 
I do think we should always be a little skeptical when men undertake to write women. Since I would be the last person to claim any particular insight into this endeavor, I just have to settle for trying to make my female characters interesting people (shock!).
 
There is one way in which I try to leverage my ignorance when it comes to writing Selenis, however, and that is to rely on the smoke and mirrors of mystery and distance--which is where a good deal of the whole femme fatale archetype has come from in our cultural output, I would guess. So we don't tend to hear her thoughts directly, unlike Vero's case with his frequent self-narration. This often forces long periods of silence on the comic, which worried me at first but which I have actually grown to enjoy, as it gives lots of opportunities to play at guessing what she's thinking. We have learned at least one thing about her, though: she is fiercely independent and determined to be second to nobody--not even the Grim Reaper!
 
 
 
 
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  The Egg and preplanetary nebulae; Moon mirrorMay 10, 2012 3:24 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:NASA recently posted a new Hubble photo--taken in visible and infrared light--of the Egg Nebula:
 
Image
image by NASA (source)
 
The Egg is a star in the "preplanetary or protoplanetary nebula stage," and that is actually an awful name for it because it makes it sound like a young star with a protoplanetary disc, whereas it is actually an old, dying star, perhaps once around the size of the Sun, which exhausted most of its hydrogen fuel, shrunk to a small, hot, helium-burning core that blew the outer hydrogen layers far out to form a huge red giant, possibly with a radius as large as the distance from the Sun to Earth, used up its helium, resumed burning of the remaining parts of the large hydrogen outer shell, and now, having lost maybe 50-70% of its mass, has a very disrupted outer shell which alternates with the inner helium shell in burning, every 10,000 to 100,000 years--this is called "helium shell flash" or "thermal pulse." As part of all these goings on in the dying star, jets and material are being ejected pretty frequently, forming this agitated nebula around the star. In the case of the Egg, the cloud of ejected material around it is so thick we can't see the star itself, but we can see "searchlight" beams from it, perhaps shining through holes in the clouds poked by jets from flashes or pulses. The name "preplanetary/protoplanetary" comes from this being the precursor to the "planetary nebula" stage, where a very extended, ring-like cloud has been pushed far out and heated to a glow by the very hot exposed core of the star that remains.
 
What with the dying and the cloud of material around them, preplanetary nebulae are quite dim; unlike the later planetary nebula stage, the cooler clouds around the star in the preplanetary stage do not glow on their own, but only reflect light coming out from the central star; the Egg may be within 3,000 light years of Earth--although its exact size and distance is by no means certain, maybe at least partly because so little is known of this phase of stellar life that there isn't much in the way of a "standard candle" with which to compare its luminosity and size, from which you could estimate distance--but it wasn't discovered until 1996 (although the NASA post says "was first spotted less than 40 years ago," so I'm not sure if that means it was spotted in old photos but not identified, or if their number is just a typo) because it's so hard to see.
 
More preplanetary nebula photos, swiped from Wikipedia:
 
A Hubble photo of the Egg from 2002, with color filters tinting light vibrating at different angles; the caption notes the material from which it is reflecting is mostly carbon:
 
Image
image by NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) (source)
 
Orange and infrared false color Hubble photo of preplanetary nebula IRAS 13208-6020, released in 2011:
 
Image
image by ESA/Hubble & NASA (source)
 
Yellow and near-infrared false color Hubble photo of preplanetary nebula IRAS 20068+4051, released in 2010:
 
Image
image by ESA/Hubble & NASA (source)
 
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This space.com article describes an interesting observational experiment that will be run with Hubble next month, when Venus will pass between Earth and the Sun: sunlight coming to us through the clouds around the rim of Venus will carry spectral data revealing elements of the Venusian atmosphere; Hubble is far too light-sensitive to survive being aimed directly at the Sun, though, so instead it will be aimed at a fixed point on the Moon for the full seven hours of Venus' solar transit, and will be trying to pick out the tiny, tiny Venusian light components among the regular sunlight reflecting off the bright lunar surface: "...they're looking for extremely faint spectral signatures. Only 0.001 percent of the sun's light will filter through Venus's thick atmosphere and be reflected off the moon..."
 
Pretty wild. And this isn't even being done really to learn about Venus' atmosphere, which is already pretty well known--the US and especially the Soviets have landed unmanned spacecraft on the planet, after all (interesting note: 1982's Soviet "Venera 14" Venus lander missed its chance at a soil sample because its probe, striking for the soil, was blocked by its own ejected camera lens cap, which happened to lay exactly where the probe tried to strike). So this elaborate lunar mirror experiment is being done as a test of the quality of data gathered from sunlight filtered through planetary atmospheres--they'll compare the results with what's already known about Venus' atmosphere to see if the readings are good--in the hopes that it can later be applied to detect the atmospheric content of planets around other stars: one main method of detecting planets around other stars is to spot a regular periodic dimming of the star's light caused--in theory--by one of its planets moving between it and us, so I guess the idea is that maybe we could also get useful spectral data about the atmosphere of the planet from that dimmed light.
 
~~~~~~~~
 
I came across another comic with interesting art! This one is (warning: mature language and themes) The Ballad of Frank Sartre, and the best description I can come up with is that it's kind of like an ultra-noir "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" with intensely brushy black and white artwork.
 
 
 
 
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  Supermassive Black Pen Round-up!May 09, 2012 1:18 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:~~~~~~~~
 
Are you ready for a Supermassive Black Pen Round-up? Well tough luck, because you've just landed on one! Starting at the end of the last episode and running a good way through this one, I was a bit obsessed with finding pens I could use to do the art for A*, either in tandem with a brush, or on their own. I'm pretty much back to all brush now, but I've got all these pens laying around, and some test sketches I did with some of them, so I might as well say a word or two about them. For the most part, the exotic ones can be found at Jetpens, and the rest at Dick Blick. Also for the most part, their ink isn't as black as say the inks I covered in my recent Supermassive Black Ink Round-up; all of them (unless noted otherwise) are quite adequately waterproof.
 
Here was the assortment I was thinking I might use for A* at one point (except the last one :p) (these photos are angled away a bit, so the upper pens appear slightly smaller by comparison to the lower ones than they actually are):
 
Image
 
And here are the test sketches (on Canson Illustration paper, with finger smudge to test their waterproofness):
 
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Kuretake Disposable Pocket Brush
I found out about these fancy-looking yet disposable Japanese markers by asking comic book artist Mike Mayhew what he had used to draw this nifty sketch of Aquaman--he'd used these! Most disposable Japanese art markers, and especially brush markers, are not waterproof, but these are, and they're quite reasonably priced as well. The EF and F sizes have hard little conical tips that lay down very fine, even lines. High quality stuff, no doubt, and their solid plastic construction with gold embossed calligraphic lettering and gold sparkles only adds to that impression--the caps click on and off with a very satisfying firmness. There's a bit more resistance when moving the tip over paper than I would like--almost a rubbery stickiness, but not quite--but that's the only nit I can pick with these, although it is rather equivalent to a nails-on-chalkboard sensation for me compared with, say, a brush. Hm, I suppose you could say that they run a little dry, but I would find later that that's necessary for doing non-damaging work on paper. The tip of the larger M size is different--much bigger, and softer--and I found it much less pleasant to work with than the two smaller sizes; it's just an awkward balance between hard and soft, big and small--if I were gonna use these I'd use the two smaller sizes, and probably a Copic Multiliner M brush instead of the Kuretake one.
 
Platinum Carbon Desk Pen
This is a pretty neat pen. It's actually a fountain pen! Rated EF (extra-fine), but apparently Japanese fountain pens are pretty much a size smaller than their Western equivalents, so it's more like a "super-fine" nib; normally, I hear, a nib this fine would feel pretty scratchy, but this pen is actually pretty smooth, and quite pleasant to write with. If I wanted to feel fancy while writing something, I would use this. Even so it isn't very expensive at all; in fact, the reason I got it was really just to try Platinum's "Carbon" ink that it comes with in a couple disposable refill cartridges, because this pen was cheaper than a small bottle of the ink alone. And it does lay down a very fine, smooth line, but I couldn't use it for A* because, like dip pen nibs, it tends to chew up the surface of the paper, especially if you're going over ink wash or something. The "Carbon" ink, which is apparently a super-fine India ink (even so, this pen supposedly needs its special wide feed to avoid being clogged by it), is quite waterproof, but not really very black. Being a "desk" pen, it's meant to sit holstered in a swivel cap attached to a fancy base sitting on your fancy desk, so it has a long, tapered body (with a hole at the end, it should be mentioned, so it can't be converted to an "eyedropper" pen by filling the body with ink) that doesn't allow "posting" of the cap. It's pretty light and comfortable to hold, though.
 
J. Herbin Glass Pen - Large
I didn't even know these existed until I saw and heard (they make this great glass fluting sound as their tip moves across paper) them in this video; glass pens like this, apparently, are used for testing inks, since you get a good view of the ink as it sits and flows in the twisting channels on the large glass tip--so it works like a dip pen, ie you dip the tip into your jar of ink (I was using Yasutomo Waterproof Black Sumi), and then write with it until all the ink has been sucked off the fluted tip and onto the paper. Pretty neat! This French glass pen didn't seem to hold as much ink in its flutes as a standard dip pen nib does in its reservoir, and like a dip pen nib it did tend to scratch up the paper's surface. I tried rounding the tip--which came with a definite point--using some fine sandpaper, as suggested on the box, but didn't really manage to tone down the paper damage much. Unlike a dip pen, the glass tip isn't flexible at all, so you get no line width variation whatsoever; this does make them handy if what you really want is an even line, though. And they just look (and sound) darn cool.
 
Copic Multiliner 0.1
Multiliners come in a variety of somewhat odd, small sizes (like 0.03, 0.05, 0.1, 0.3, 0.5, 0.8, 1.0 mm), but of the various types of similar technical or whatever you call 'em markers that I tried (the others were Sakura Pigma Microns, Staedtler whatevers, and Faber-Castells PITTs), the Multiliners had the finest size (the others were 0.05 mm at the smallest), and possibly fractionally the darkest ink and most even lines. I used Multiliners on a good number of the pages earlier in this chapter. You don't really get width variation out of their hard conical tips, but they're actually pretty good at feathering, if you flick them just right. They may feel a little dry if you're used to regular markers, but--as I found with wetter technical markers (see the Tikky Graphic, below)--they're pretty much as wet as you can get without risking real damage to the paper surface due to saturation weakening the fibers of the paper, which would then yield too easily to the hard marker tip. I like the narrow, round bodies of these markers, and their dark gray, silvery sparkled surface, but it's a light plastic that feels a bit cheap, particularly with the cap, which just sort of snugs on and off rather than clicking, and which posts very fudgily on the end; I had a few dry out on me between uses, and I think that might have been because the cap wasn't really on as tightly as it needed to be. I also had a few just die on me rather quickly; these have no cartridge or visible reservoir, so you don't have any warning as to when one might expire. I also killed a bunch of them by getting the tips clogged with white ink, it must be said--even though no white ink might be visible on the tip, the marker would just never regain its full ink flow. A few of the mystery dead ones did manage to revive, however, after I left them standing upside-down for a day or two. When they work, they work well, but they aren't the most reliable pens around, and you can't do *really* fast lines with them without skipping, due to the carefully measured ink flow.
 
Copic Multiliner SP 0.7
These are the refillable, metal-bodied versions of the Multiliner, and are in theory the more economical (and ecological?) option in the long run since you can replace the tips and ink cartridges. I don't really like the metallic chill you feel when first picking one up that you haven't handled in a while, but they warm to the touch pretty quickly, and unlike the disposables, their small caps click into place with satisfying security--although they don't post as securely as one might like. Rather confusingly, the sizes they come in are slightly different than the disposables, in some cases.
 
Faber-Castell PITT calligraphy pen
For a while I thought this was THE pen I was going to use--you can get a lot of line variation by using different edges or corners of the 2 mm, fairly hard sloped chisel tip, and it puts out a satisfying amount of ink--or more than the Multiliners, anyway. Very fun to play with a fresh one of these. But! I found that the tips are rather unreliable, and can lose their ink flow without warning; the one in the photo actually has a bit of masking tape around the far side, just below the tip, to remind me that that corner is pretty dead. Frustrating! They also sometimes shed a fiber or two--you have to go and pluck it off with tweezers or something--at the beginning. These may be even less reliable than the disposable Multiliners. Also, even the caps can be a bit flakey; the button at the end is a separate piece, for some reason, and it sometimes gets a bit loose, which somehow makes it so that the cap, which usually clicks firmly into place, doesn't click closed anymore unless you press the end of the cap down as you slide the cap into place; very surprising given how solid the rest of the body feels.
 
Faber-Castell PITT small brush
Has a harder tip than Japanese "brush" markers, but it's so narrow that it tends to feel a bit woggley, whatever that means. Just didn't like the feel or the sort of intermediate size. Has the same flukey button cap as the PITT calligraphy pens.
 
Rotring Tikky Graphic 0.1
Another line of technical markers like the Multiliners, etc. I like that these come in regular, tenth-of-a-mm sizes, though. Though disposable, they feel extremely solid, and the large caps even have metal clips. They also have an ink reservoir view window so you can tell when you're running low; Rotring's marketing claims that the reservoir and feed design ensures they use every last drop of their pretty generous ink supply, but I haven't used enough to verify that. They also give out by far the most ink of any of the technical marker lines I tried; this is great if you're just doodlin', as you get nice even, wet lines even when moving quickly, but if you're really trying to go into some detail, or if you're going over paper that's been wet previously by a wash or something, the paper surface will tend to get oversaturated and then get chewed up by the marker's hard conical tip pretty easily. Also, they cannot do feathering at all; as soon as you touch the tip to paper to any degree, you get the full ink flow.
 
Rotring Rapidograph 0.25
I included this since I had it laying around, although I knew from when I covered it previously that its hard metal tube tip can't draw lines very quickly without skipping, and chews up the paper like nobody's business. It can't really be beat for fine, even lines, though. I don't think I'll ever get used to the screw-off cap on this thing--I keep trying to yank it off. :P
 
Alvin Penstix No. 3013-EEF 0.3mm
Saw this in a local art store; it is shockingly awful. The ink is brown! I had to double-check that the pen body said "black"; it does (although I notice now that the "India ink quality" after that is in quotes ;P), but man that ain't no black. The small cap with sharp fluting doesn't snap into place, and the narrow body with fixed plastic clip at the end and 90-degree edges toward the tip doesn't feel engineered for any kind of pleasant user experience. The tip is of the small, hard, conical (and spongey) variety. Do not get this unless you really need a brown, uncomfortable small marker.
 
~~~~
 
So of those I felt the Kuretake EF and F, Pitt calligraphy pen, Multiliners, and J. Herbin glass pen were the best with an eye toward A* work, so I did another, slightly larger set of sketches with those finalists:
 
Image
 
The PITT calligraphy pen was by far the most fun to use, and you can see there that I was getting the most solid lines out of it.
 
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Here's another crop of pens I have laying around from my pen-speriments:
 
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Copic Multiliner Brush M
I felt this was worth mentioning on its own, because the large, somewhat soft "brush" (it isn't really like a brush at all, mind you) felt or whatever tip has a kind of pleasing squishiness and wetness to it. I don't really like it for doing big line work, because it doesn't feel firm enough to me for a really reliable line, but it's very good at filling in large areas. These only come in the disposables--the metal "SP" line just has the small brush, which isn't nearly as satisfying. The soft tip *does* tend to fluff out and lose its shape fairly quickly--well before it ran out of ink, for me--which is a shame, but I haven't found a soft marker tip that has found a way to avoid that problem.
 
Staedtler Calligraphy duo 3002
There aren't really many waterproof black pigment ink chisel tip markers out there, so when I saw this I figured it was worth a shot even though dual-tip pens drive me buggy for some reason. The clear plastic caps can post to each other, so *that* isn't a problem, at least. The 3.5 mm and 2.0 mm chisel tips are harder than the tip of the PITT calligraphy pen; I'm not sure if that means that they're more reliable, but they *are* more prone to chewing up the surface of the paper. Other than that it seems like a very solid pen.
 
uni-ball Signo broad White
I was turned onto this white gel pen--which I thought might be useful for touch-ups--by a couple white pen reviews I found after I got the Sunburst (see below) and wanted to see how it stacked up. The Signo seems to be the most highly recommended white gel option, and it is indeed much more generous and opaque than the Sunburst. It is not (and doesn't claim to be) waterproof at all and, being a ball point, runs into the problem where the generous line of somewhat thick ink is divided by the metal tip laying it down, so you get a kind of two-line effect, which probably isn't desired in most cases.
 
Pentel Sunburst Med
Picked this up on a whim at a supply store; does offer some non-waterproof white gel ink coverage, but the ink isn't quite as thick or as opaque as could be; also seems to dry up slightly more easily than the Signo, and shares the two-line problem with the ball point tip.
 
Faber-Castell PITT big brush
Of all the pens here, this is the sole one that I'm really still using, if just for sketching (I did do a page or two of this episode with it almost exclusively, though). The large brush tip is quite firm, which doesn't seem nice at first if you're used to softer Japanese large "brush" pens, but it holds up very well with use, taking much longer to lose its shape. Faber-Castell claims these carry something like four times the ink of their regular-sized PITT markers; I'm not sure about that, but I can say I haven't "hit bottom" on one yet--they seem to run into a diminished ink flow some time before that, at which point I don't like them anymore and have to go get a new one. Until that point, though, they put out a very nice, even wet line. The ink is not of course quite as dark as brush inks, but if you layer it up--which is easy to do thanks to the large tip and generous ink flow--it can achieve this kind of nifty, velvety black gloss, which is nice to look at even if it doesn't scan well due to being somewhat reflective. I was a bit wary at first of the large, firm tip, fearing it would be clumsy, but while it can't make a *very* thin line, you can get a reasonable amount of width variation by holding it at different angles, and it is by far the best of any of the markers I tried at laying down big, fast, long, solid lines, and it is of course great at filling in large areas--this is really the only marker I've found that can keep up with my frenetic, heavy sketching. The hard plastic body feels very solid, the thick cap clicks into place definitively, and I haven't had one have the loose-button-cap problem the smaller PITTs sometimes have. Very reliable and quite affordable for how much pen you get.
 
Pentel Pocket Brush
This brush pen actually has individual brush hairs at its tip like a real brush, although they're nylon or something, and actually cut and angled inward to form a sharply tapered point; this seems to mean they always keep a very sharp tip, but at the cost of overall brush strength: there's no real snap or flex here--they're either dragging a loose line, or squooshing into the paper. They're very popular for their portability, though--no having to carry ink and rinse jars around with you--and some webcomics get good results with them. Their ink is waterproof and surprisingly dark--I wish Pentel sold the stuff in bottles! Alas, it only comes in small disposable cartridge refills. The pen body, though plastic, feels very solid indeed, but with a graceful, rounded, stylish exterior--top marks there. In theory these could be converted into eyedropper pens, I think, and I *have* read of some people using Platinum Carbon ink with them, although in theory that risks clogging issues. The small, black Selenis sketch above the other pen test sketches earlier in this post was done with this pen; as you can see, it is pretty handy at big black fill, and feathering, but I at least am pretty much unable to get hard, even lines out of the weak tip. (The big face next to that sketch was done with PITT big brush and calligraphy pens; it was an early attempt at I think page 26.)
 
Update 5/29: Since I've mostly moved away from regular pens now, I've found myself going to the Pocket Brush lately when I want to do a quick sketch, or even just for when I need something brushy and fast, like for signing paintings. It is quite a handy thing! I should note that although the ink is darker than most of the marker-type pens, it isn't nearly as dark as a good stand-alone ink such as you would use with a regular brush.
 
Pentel Color Brush - Black
Larger, uglier cousin of the Pocket Brush. The Color Brushes are not waterproof, but come in a variety of colors, and I guess they're meant to be used as portable watercolors, sort of. Should be able to hold much more ink, too, because the large, squeezable body is a single large refill cartridge. You're suppose to squeeze it to get ink to flow--unlike the Pocket Brush, which just flows at a set rate automatically--and in theory this offers much more control and variety, as you could use it for dry brush, spatter, and so forth; when I tried it, though, instead of saturating the tapered nylon bristles all the way to their tips, the ink just gushed out the sides and dripped in a big slash right onto the page below. :o And again, the weak tip isn't my thing, but some people get pretty darn fine black and white sketches out of them.
 
Yasutomo YC Permawriter II FS - 0.05
Saw this at some local store and figured it was with a shot since I was using Yasutomo's sumi ink anyway. The design of the pen body is uncomfortably severe, and the line its fine conical tip puts out is a bit squishy, and not up to par with other technical marker lines in that respect. It was, however, the most waterproof of any of the pens I tried--supposedly they're even permanent on CDs and so forth.
 
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That ends the Supermassive Black Pen Round-up! I will probably not bother you with pen talk for a while as I'm back pretty happily with the brush these days, but I suppose you never know what the future holds!
 
 
 
 
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  The cockeyed aurorae of UranusMay 08, 2012 2:06 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:The Hubble Space Telescope got a pretty good view of aurorae on the planet Uranus recently:
 
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image by NASA, ESA, and L. Lamy (Observatory of Paris, CNRS, CNES) (source)
 
Not exactly where you'd think they'd be (at poles perpendicular to the ring), are they? NASA's caption says:

These are among the first clear images, taken from the distance of Earth, to show aurorae on the planet Uranus. Aurorae are produced when high-energy particles from the Sun cascade along magnetic field lines into a planet's upper atmosphere. This causes the planet's atmospheric gasses to fluoresce. The ultraviolet images were taken at the time of heightened solar activity in November 2011 that successively buffeted the Earth, Jupiter, and Uranus with a gusher of charged particles from the Sun. Because Uranus' magnetic field is inclined 59 degrees to its spin axis, the auroral spots appear far from the planet's north and south poles. This composite image combines 2011 Hubble observations of the aurorae in visible and ultraviolet light, 1986 Voyager 2 photos of the cyan disk of Uranus as seen in visible light, and 2011 Gemini Observatory observations of the faint ring system as seen in infrared light.

Uranus' magnetic field is not only at a funny angle, it's also offset "from the center of the planet towards the south rotational pole by as much as one third of the planetary radius":
 
Image
image by Ruslik0, per Voyager 2's 1986 readings (source)
 
Weird! Wikipedia says "Neptune has a similarly displaced and tilted magnetic field, suggesting that this may be a common feature of ice giants. One hypothesis is that, unlike the magnetic fields of the terrestrial and gas giant planets, which are generated within their cores, the ice giants' magnetic fields are generated by motion at relatively shallow depths, for instance, in the water–ammonia ocean."
 
~~~~~~~~
 
I came across a webcomic with really nice art! It's called Astray3, and it's a sorta science-fiction fantasy adventure type of thing, I think. Anyway, in the last four or so pages, which were coming out about once a month (and then stopped entirely, but a recent blog post by the author says new developments are in store, so we can hope), the inking and coloring really reached an awesome level of gorgeousness, almost getting semi-abstract in parts if you look carefully, but always coming together into a perfectly intelligible image. NICE.
 
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I'm still working away at A*'s upcoming subscription mode on the weekends; this past weekend I got the thingy done that will let subscribers change their password. WOO. Next I have to do a thingy to let them change their email address, oh and also a thing so you can reset your password if you've forgotten it--that one's kind of tricky because you have to send them an email with a special limited-use URL that resets it when clicked or something, I guess... Anyway yeah that's the kind of fun stuff I'm weekending on! And just to be clear, the comic will always be free--subscribers just get access to the extra-large comic size, and get the ads removed. Also one nice thing the real subscription mode will do that the current preview mode doesn't (that link in the lower right corner of the comics) is that as long as you don't log out or clear your browser's cookies, every time you come to the site it will come right up with your previously selected comic size, so if you've been reading in the HD-size, you'll see that right away when visiting the site, without having to click something to embiggen them.
 
 
 
 
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  I for one welcome Festo's bionic overlordsMay 05, 2012 8:57 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:A while back I posted a video of "Robojelly," a US-produced mechanical jellyfish. Well, German pneumatic and electric transducer manufacturer Festo has something much, much more impressive--the AirJelly:
 
video on Youtube
 
And that flying robot jellyfish (they've got an aquatic one, naturally) isn't even the most impressive of Festo's robot creations; that would probably be SmartBird, a flight-capable robot bird. But they've got whole flocks of other amazing lighter-than-air robots, like these blimpy, self-navigating AirPenguins, their AirRay, which looks like a really creepy flat metallic balloon, and their SmartInversion, a flying...M. C. Escher-ish geometric thing that twists upon itself to generate propulsion--all constructed from ultralight materials, propelled with Festo's new line of pneumatic actuators, and mostly buoyed with helium.
 
Here's a video in which they describe how some of their "bionic" creations work:
 
video on Youtube
 
I was pointed to Festo's stuff by a reader on A*'s ComicFury mirror. :)
 
 
 
 
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  SuperbiomassiveMay 04, 2012 7:21 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:A lot of what NASA does isn't just looking out at space, but looking back at Earth *from* space. For instance, how 'bout them forests?
 
A map released in 2010 showed forest heights around the world, with a particular focus on the continental United States. Using readings from reflected laser pulses ("LIDAR") collected by three satellites--NASA's ICESat, Terra, and Aqua--the agency was able to determine the heights of trees in forest, and compile that into a detailed map. The highest forests were found in the Pacific Northwest (yay! :) and parts of southeast Asia. Here's the map of forest heights in the United States:
 
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image by NASA Earth Observatory/Image by Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon/Based on data from Michael Lefsky (source)
 
They went one better in 2011, putting together even more detailed maps, collaborating "with the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to assemble a national forest map from space-based radar and optical sensors, computer modeling, and a massive amount of ground-based data." An estimated 5 million trees were measured! The "space-based radar" data came "from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, which was flown on the space shuttle Endeavour in 2000." Wikipedia says Endeavour was outfitted with two radar antennae for the mission: "One antenna was located in the Shuttle's payload bay, the other – a critical change from the SIR-C/X-SAR, allowing single-pass interferometry – on the end of a 60-meter (200-foot) mast that extended from the payload bay once the Shuttle was in space. The technique employed is known as Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar," which uses "differences in the phase of the [reflected radar] waves" to determine heights in great detail.
 
They combined that data with Landsat satellite images and on-the-ground measurements by the U.S. Forest Service to come up with a very detailed map of biomass across the country--not just how high the trees are, but how dense they are, so they were also able to map the overall carbon content of the forests. Here's the US biomass map:
 
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image by NASA Earth Observatory; map by Robert Simmon, based on multiple data sets compiled and analyzed by the Woods Hole Research Center. Data inputs include the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, the National Land Cover Database (based on Landsat) and the Forest Inventory and Analysis of the U.S. Forest Service. Caption by Michael Carlowicz. (source)
 
Here's a zoomed-in view of the Pacific Northwest:
 
Image
image by Robert Simmon, based on data from Woods Hole Research Center (source)
 
Those grid patterns in the center (just below Seattle, which is on the mid-east side of that big inlet, which is Puget Sound) are from logging!
 

The coastal Pacific Northwest of the United States has the tallest trees in North America, averaging as much as 40 meters (131 feet) in height. It has the densest biomass—the total mass of organisms living within a given area—in the country.


A rule of thumb for ecologists is that the amount of carbon stored in a tree equals 50 percent of its dry biomass. So if you can estimate the biomass of all the trees in the forest, you can estimate how much carbon is being stored. If you keep tracking it over time, you can know something about how much carbon is being absorbed from the atmosphere or lost to it.


In a recent report by the U.S. Forest Service, researchers noted that while the federal government owns slightly less than 50 percent of the forest land in the Pacific Northwest, it controls more then 67 percent of the old-growth in the region. That percentage is rising not because of new federal acquisitions, but because harvesting removed about 13 percent (491,000 acres) of old- and “late-sucessional” forest on non-federal lands. (The main reason for old-growth loss on federal lands is forest fire.)

Here's the Seattle area at the released map's highest detail level; my biomass is just to the left of that biggish lake in the north central area!
 
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  The big ol' black hole in M83May 03, 2012 6:58 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Image
image by X-ray: NASA/CXC/Curtin University/R. Soria et al., Optical: NASA/STScI/ Middlebury College/F. Winkler et al. (source)
 
^ That's a section of galaxy M83 in a composite image of Chandra X-ray and optical data. The large, deep pink spot at the top middle is a new ultraluminous X-ray source, or "ULX"; these are objects that give off more gamma ray radiation than typical binary systems, or "as much energy in X-rays as a million suns radiate at all wavelengths." In the case of the most powerful ULXs, the suggestion is that one of the binary partners is a very large black hole, on the order of 40 to 100 solar masses; the largest known stellar mass black hole in our galaxy, by comparison, is more like 15 solar masses.
 
But there are a few even more unusual things about this particular ULX. One is its high variability: "the source had increased in X-ray brightness by at least 3,000 times [between 2000 and 2010] and has since become the brightest X-ray source in M83," says NASA. The other is the age of its stellar companion, which is thought to be a red giant, about 500 million years old; in a binary system, the two bodies are usually about the same age, having formed from the same source, so the implication is that this black hole is about 500 million years old. Other ULXs before this one had hot, bright young blue stars for companions, so this is the first time astronomers have seen evidence for a large stellar mass black hole this old.
 
This suggests that there could be many more old black holes drifting around, which I suppose most astronomers would predict--given that very large stars almost invariably form black holes at the end of their relatively brief lives, in theory--but they're usually darned hard to spot, so they got a bit lucky that they were looking when this one started eating some material and sending out X-rays (and that its jet was pointing directly at us, of course). I tend to think that once a good way of detecting the quiet black holes is hit upon, we'll find that there are oodles and oodles of them, young and old, pretty much everywhere stars have been.
 
 
 
 
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  Supermassive Black Ink Round-up part 3 final!May 02, 2012 6:05 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:~~~~~~
 
Okay, let's finish up the Supermassive Black Ink Round-up! A*'s new ink will be revealed, and then we'll probably never have to talk about ink again. :P Well...at least not for a while, most likely.
 
This is part 3 of the round-up; for part 2, go here. At the end of that last part, I said I'd narrowed the field down to four finalists, plus the late-comer dark horse: Kuretake Manga Ink, Deleter Black 4, Dr. Ph. Martin's Black Star Matte, Deleter Black 3, and Dr. Ph. Martin's Black Star Hicarb. I don't know why they're in that order exactly but that's the order in which I painted quick test paintings with them, so here we go:
 

Kuretake Manga Ink
 
Image
 
This one looks a bit blotchy in the wash on the cheek, but that was really just due to me blotting it clumsily--not the ink's fault. The washes did have a bit of a spongy edge bleed to them, rather like I tended to get with light washes using sumi ink, which I'd used for most of the A* pages up to this point--the paper is a factor here, as I hadn't had this problem with the sumi ink until I switched from Arches Watercolor paper to Canson Illustration paper, which has an invisible clay coating on its surface designed to stop bleeding--but in the case of washes it seems to backfire a bit, at least with certain inks--the Yasutomo Sumi and this Kuretake Manga inks being two of them.
 
It came out nice and black, but if you look closely, you'll see a pattern of short parallel ridges in the black in the lower left hand corner: that's the paper's scarcely perceptible texture, reflecting in the scanner's light. This ink is highly reflective! Probably too much so. You can see it in the photo I took, too:
 
Image
 
The washes also come out a bit yellow, as expected. But overall, the ink handled well and was pleasant to work with.
 

Deleter Black 4
 
Image
 
What a shocker this one was! Aside from this painting suffering from horrible draftsmanship, which was my fault, the ink itself seemed to separate into watery and oily constituents: you can see the wateriness in the way the eyelashes came out lighter than the rest--they were the first bit I tried painting--and the oiliness in whatever the heck happened to the jawline. Yeegh.
 
It was also more yellow than the Kuretake, and even the Deleter White 2 I put on over the shoulder in the lower right corner started to change a bit from its usual slightly bluishness (when over black ink) to more of a yellow tone; you can't really see it in this photo but just pretend:
 
Image
 
I was really surprised at how awful this ink was to work with.
 

Dr. Ph. Martin's Black Star Matte
 
Image
 
This one, although not that dark in person (not that you can really tell here since this photo had its contrast raised as I usually do with photos, but hey),
 
Image
 
had delightful super-smooth, non-reflective blacks that scanned very well--just look how nice and smooth those large black areas came out in the scan!
 
It did wash rather yellow, though, and the washes seemed to form hard edges rather more quickly than I'd expected, making it difficult to build a gradient effect. This may have just been clumsiness on my part, however.
 

Deleter Black 3
 
Image
 
Deleter Black 3 is kind of middle of the road among these finalist inks in terms of darkness and gloss, but that balance seems to work pretty well for my scanning process.
 
Although this ink looked like the least waterproof of the new inks I tested in the first round of testing, second only to the sumi I had been using, I didn't have a problem with it muddling the Deleter White 2 I applied to some parts of the painting--I *did* tend to have that problem with the sumi ink. So its poor performance in the ink blot test may just have been a fluke, I dunno.
 
The really nice thing about this one, and I suppose you probably can't see it in the photo but you could try,
 
Image
 
is how smooth the washes came out: no bristle marks or internal edges or other artifacts like I often get with other inks, and the outer edges didn't have that spongy bleeding I was talking about seeing with the sumi and Kuretake Manga inks. And best of all, there is very little yellow in it--maybe none at all, but I don't have one of those fancy full-spectrum lights to get a really neutral reading on it--all my lights are yellow, bah. :P
 
In any case, it looks really good in person, and scans pretty well too.
 

Dr. Ph. Martin's Black Star Hicarb
 
Image
 
Another shocker! I had high hopes for this one based on the blot test (see Round-up part 2), where it looked pretty darn dark coming thickly off the Q-tip, but when I actually tried painting it on with a brush, it came out really, really gray. I dried my brush and re-dipped a few times to see if I'd just had some water on the brush or something, but no, gray it was, and only started getting a bit darker if I sort of layered it up a bit. It was also a bit yellow, although that was expected after the blot test. It is decently matte, but just so wishy-washy in the black department as to be entirely unserviceable. Rather bizarre. I keep thinking this must have been a fluke but I dunno, I gave it a few retries and no go. Here's the photo:
 
Image
 

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We can use Photoshop to get a bit more quantitative about comparing these finalists. For instance, I took a photo of the first four of them in an otherwise dark room with my camera's flash--which is probably the most neutral light source I have
 
Image
 
--to get a color comparison; the piece above them was the last page done with the Yasutomo Sumi ink. And...okay so you can't really see much color difference in this photo. Granted, even the yellowest of these inks is still pretty gray--still, even a little yellow will tend to stand out when you have something framed up on a wall, as I found out in my last art show. ;_; Anyway, we can see their relative yellowness by using Photoshop to crank up the saturation:
 
Image
 
The blue parts are mostly from where I was testing Deleter White 2 over the black inks. Anyway, as you can see, the Deleter Black 3 stands out somewhat as having the lowest yellow levels.
 
To analyze the quality of their blackness, we can compare their histograms:
 
Image
 
These show the amount of each image occurring across the range of values, from pure black on the left to pure white on the right. Since these were scanned in and my scanner doesn't reproduce pure black, even the blackest blacks come out a bit gray in the histograms of the original scans, so don't worry about that--what we're really looking for here is a nice, steep left slope on the left end of the histogram: the steeper that slope, the purer the black.
 
The Kuretake Manga ink, for instance, has a pretty narrow black peak, which is good; Deleter Black 4, on the other hand, has a very wide black peak, which means its black values were scattered lighter and darker, which is not so good. The unsurpassed smoothness of Black Star Matte shows in its very steep left slope--top marks there. Deleter Black 3, as we've seen elsewhere, was kind of an average performer in the histogram as well, and Hicarb...well, it didn't really form a black peak at all.
 
~~~~~~~
 
That was it for my tests! Which ink is in the mystery A* ink bottle, then?
 
Image
 
That's a Black Star Matte bottle, with its label strategically blacked out with a Sharpie marker. But inside it is...Deleter Black 3! Yep. A good all-around performer, and by far the best-looking of the inks, when seen in person. It comes in crummy plastic jars, but swap one of the nice Dr. Ph. Martin jars in, and you're in business. (I noticed Dr. Ph. Martin even sells empty ink bottles, but with say Bombay Black going for just 20 cents more in the same type of jar, you might as well get that and just empty it into something else.)
 
So Deleter Black 3 it is! Next: less talking about ink, more talking about other stuff!
 
 
 
 
·····
 
 
 
 
  Supermassive Black Ink Round-up part 2!May 01, 2012 4:16 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:~~~~~~~
 
Part 2 of the Supermassive Black Ink round-up! For part one, go here.
 
In part one I showed a photo of the inks tested, and the "report card" of blot tests, three with each ink, applied to Canson Illustration paper with a clean Q-tip: a) one of the pure ink, b) a second of the pure ink, gone over with i) a water-dipped Q-tip, ii) a Mars Plastic eraser, and iii) Deleter White 2 ink, and c) a diluted wash of the ink. For (a) I was mostly looking at darkness and shine, for (b) how well the ink resisted damage, and for (c) how close to pure gray (ie non-yellow) the ink appeared in a wash.
 
Here's a scan of the (a) row that shows the darkness of the inks a little more clearly, although with a certain amount of lightening of some of the inks due to their reflective surfaces:
 
Image
 
An oversaturated photo of the (c) row, to show the relative yellowness of the washes:
 
Image
 
Now, if we take samples of each black from that scan of the (a) row, blur them to make it easier to see their overall value, and then raise the contrast to make it easier to compare them, we get a relative scale of their values (lightness to darkness). But some of those patches were actually kind of uneven, mostly due to uneven reflection from the surface. If instead of adjusting their value relative to each other, we adjust it relative to the paper next to them, we get another relative scale, this time of their gloss (high gloss to matte):
 
Image
 
That's the meat of it, but below you'll find individual descriptions of the ink from their test session. For the most part these weren't selected very scientifically, but were just ones I found in local art supply stores, or that I saw getting particularly interesting mention online when I was searching for waterproof black pigment inks:
 

Yasutomo Waterproof Sumi
 
I used one 12 ounce bottle of this ink, with maybe one ounce remaining, for all of the inked A* pages through episode 16, page 45; episode 13, page 136 was the first page I did off the computer, so that was a total of eh I think 139 pages all done with that one bottle, not to mention all the other ink drawings and paintings I did over that 6 month+ span that started back on October 11th. And I should add that probably on most occasions I wasted about half of what I poured out to use, because I didn't want to pour back the unused portion, as it would have been at least partially diluted by the washes I'd been doing with it. Considering that their 12 ounce bottles go for about $12, or $1/ounce, that's a nearly unbeatable value, especially when you consider that all but one of the other inks cost at *least* $3/ounce.
 
This stuff is easy to handle and doesn't smell bad (there's a faint smell like old beets or something if you smell it close up). It is somewhat yellowy in washes, though, rather glossy, which can make scanning it tricky, and it is not very black or waterproof, at least in comparison with most of the other inks. I was particularly having trouble with it making a gray muddle when I tried putting Deleter White 2 ink over it.
 
I still think it's a fine ink, particularly for the cost, but I was getting to the point where I needed something that was a little cleaner--hence this ink test!
 

Higgins Black Magic
 
This seems to be the most common black comic ink in the US, as far as I've heard anyway. It's maybe a hair darker than the Yasutomo Sumi, but very matte, which means it's a dull surface that is easy to scan into digital form because there's very little reflection back from the scanner's internal light source. At $3 for a 1 ounce bottle it's pretty cheap relative to the other inks, aside from the Sumi and Speedball. It smells faintly of some sort of chemicals. It isn't the darkest ink out there, it washes a bit yellow, and was one of the slowest-drying of the inks I tested, but it's a reasonably solid performer. The trademark inkwell-shaped plastic bottle is handy for resisting being tipped over, and comes with a small eyedropper descending from the inside of the cap, although it's a kind of small and not easily used eyedropper.
 
Higgins is made by Chartpak, which also makes the Rapidograph and Koh-I-Noor inks described below.
 

Speedball Super Black
 
This was the first ink I tried in my initial tests to see if I could do A* by hand, and it is not coincidentally the cheapest, going in big 32 ounce bottles for a mere $13. It is about as dark as Higgins, nearly as matte, quite waterproof, and from the mentions I've seen appears to be the second most commonly used comic ink in the States. It smells a little more strongly than Higgins and is quite fluid.
 
It is, however, incredibly yellow when diluted in a wash--really icky looking. I dropped it after a few test drawings.
 

Rapidograph Ultradraw
 
These Rapidograph and Koh-I-Noor inks go for about $4 for a 3/4 ounce bottle, although the bottles do come with a handy pointed spout, presumably for easy insertion into the ink chambers of Rapidograph technical pens. They are also incredibly fluid, and all but the Ulniversal were so fluid that, when I put a Q-tip end soaked in them into a glass jar of water, the ink immediately shot high up the sides of the glass, even to places that didn't look wet--rather a startling phenomenon!
 
In fact the distinctions between them--which seem to involve similarly worded recommended uses on paper or film--were largely lost on me. None of them are very black--they were the lightest inks in the test. Ultradraw may be the glossiest of them, and smelled faintly turpentiney.
 

Rapidograph Ulniversal
 
That is not a typo--or rather, the "Ulniversal" typo was on the label: check the photo of the bottle in part 1; it's supposed to say "Universal," of course. Reassuring quality control!
 
Like the other Rapidograph/Koh-I-Noor inks, Ulniversal isn't very black; it was perhaps the yellowest and most waterproof of them, although the least fluid (but still more fluid than most of the other inks). It smelled like glue.
 

Rapidograph Rapidraw
 
Didn't stand out much from the other Rapidograph/Koh-I-Noor inks, but may have been the glossiest. Smelled of faintly perfumey chemicals.
 

Koh-I-Noor Acetate Ink
 
Couldn't find a good link for this one--I just found it, along with the Rapidograph inks, in the University of Washington Bookstore's large art supply section. Smelled of icky chemicals and was probably the lightest of these four.
 

Pro Art India Ink
 
Along with hm another brand name I can't remember now, both of which give a P.O. box in Beaverton, Oregon as their address, Pro Art is quietly (it appears they used to have a web presence, but no more) supplying most of the art supplies I've found in non-specialty stores (such as Fred Meyer) in Seattle. This ink isn't particularly easy to find online, but at about $3 for 2 ounces, it's pretty cheap. I wanted to try it out after reading Veronica Fish's interesting ink review. And it is indeed an interesting ink, although perhaps for the wrong reasons.
 
You will notice in the chart above that it is both the second-darkest, and by far the most reflective; it dries with a very uneven, oily sheen that I think must help give it its very dark tone, at least in spots. It comes with a big, very sloppy eyedropper on the bottom of the cap, and smells of somewhat strong chocolatey chemicals. :p
 
The real nightmare begins when you try to use it: it separates very easily; in fact, the first Q-tip-full I got of it was nearly completely watery. Perhaps for a similar reason it rinses off the brush fairly easily, and dries very slowly. It would be very difficult to try painting evenly black areas with this ink.
 
On the plus side, this was one of the most waterproof of the inks I tested.
 

Dr. Ph. Martin's Bombay Black
 
An extremely smooth matte ink that is quite affordable at about $3 per ounce. It isn't the darkest, but is nicely waterproof, and should scan very cleanly. Has a sharp but not really bad chemical smell.
 

Dr. Ph. Martin's Black Star Matte
 
Basically a stronger version of the Bombay Black, Black Star Matte dries to an unbeatably smooth black matte surface. It is pretty expensive at about $10 per ounce, but that can come down to more like $6 per ounce if you buy a big 32 ounce bottle. The one ounce glass bottles this and the Bombay Black come in are very nice, though, and have a very usable snub-nose eyedropper on the underside of the cap.
 
If all I was concerned about was how my ink drawings reproduce when scanned in grayscale, I'd pretty definitely be using this ink. This was also a sentimental favorite for A* due to the "Black Star" name. :)
 

Kuretake Manga Ink
 
I was rather rooting for this ink as at just over $8 for a two-ounce bottle, it is surprisingly affordable for an imported ink. It is nice and black, and quite waterproof, with a thick feel and a slightly sweet chemical smell, but was also one of the glossiest of the inks I tried, which means it could come out unevenly when scanned.
 

Deleter Black 3
 
At about $5.50 per ounce directly from the manufacturer in Japan, this is reasonably affordable for an imported ink, although their shipping is pretty steep, so you'd kind of want to order a lot at once (for smaller amounts, the math might work out better if you order it through jetpens.com). I was made aware of this ink via an art supplies post in the Galaxion webcomic's blog.
 
One of the blacker of the tested inks, and fairly reflective, where this one stand out is in its wash: whereas all the other inks come out with a discernible yellowish tint in a wash, Deleter Black 3 washes almost a pure neutral gray; this doesn't matter for images scanned in and posted online, of course, since those are easy to desaturate digitally, but I also want A*'s original art to look nice in person, since I hope to sell it, and this is a nice-looking ink, although in the test it does appear to have been the second-least-waterproof. Has a strong turpentiney smell.
 

Deleter Black 4
 
A very black, highly waterproof, reasonably matte ink, this one looked promising in the test results, although it wasn't as nicely neutral gray as Deleter Black 3, and was significantly more expensive, at nearly $8 per ounce. Has a faint vegetably smell.
 
One annoying thing about these Deleter Black inks is that they come in these totally cylindrical, wide-mouthed, cheap plastic jars, and when you unscrew the lid, more often than not the ink has formed a big bubble right across the jar mouth--and when it pops, as it must, little drops of ink scatter around. Ugh. Really bad packaging!
 
~~~~~~~
 
And there was a late arrival that didn't get into the main test battery because I didn't find out about it until afterwards, but it sounded so potentially stupendous that I just had to try it out:
 

Dr. Ph. Martin's Black Star Hicarb
 
"Hicarb" is supposed to stand for "high carbon content," and this ink is supposed to be the darkest of Ph. Martin's line. Expensive like the Black Star Matte. Claims to contain no varnish or shellac, which are generally used to give these inks their waterproof properties, but it has *something* in there aside from just carbon, as there's a fairly chemical smell about it. Here's its test sheet:
 
Image
 
Pretty positive test as it came out dark and fairly smooth, although the waterproof aspect seemed a little iffy, and it wasn't significantly less yellow than most of the others.
 
~~~~~~
 
One ink I have messed with that I did not include in the tests is Platinum Carbon Black, because, while admirably liquid and waterproof, it isn't really very black at all--more of a dark gray. As an imported ink it's a bit pricey at about $12 per ounce.
 
~~~~~~
 
Well at the end of all that I decided on four finalists on which to conduct a more comprehensive test: painting an actual picture! The ones I chose, based on their relatively standout performances on the test battery's report card, were Black Star Matte, Kuretake Manga Ink, Deleter 3, and Deleter 4. And then I threw in Black Star Hicarb as well once it arrived.
 
So, in the next and final installment of these ink tests: the paintings, and A*'s new black ink revealed! =ooooooh~~
 
Continue on to part 3!
 
 
 
 
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